Deployments, Releases & JOY

[richardbirkin]

1h @richardbirkin @g105b

Coming to the end of Milestone 2, we had a call to tie up loose ends and spec out what we should do for Milestone 3.

We did some of that on the call, and that got us to talking about something we mentioned on our last big meeting - Releases.

Continuous deployment to a dev environment (staging server) means that features within Milestones are continuously given a real world road test. For now that will be us and whoever we give the link to. In the future it could be a community of beta testers.

These deployed features are then grouped together into a Release. This will be a significant update for the user on the production version of the site.

We can tell the user about these updates by pulling in the release notes from Github - so these should be written with that in mind.

We also spoke about JOY. There is achievement in completing milestones, and those combined achievements should have an element of joy in the Releases. This reminded me of the Government Digital Service (and later the Co-Op Digital Service set up by the same folks) and how people's laptops were plastered with stickers for the different projects/releases they had worked on - Mission Patches.

This is Chris Heathcote's laptop from the Government Digital Service. More of that here - thanks to Russell Davies for that link.

There look to be badges for:

• features (e.g. Parent Payments, Vehicle Tax & SORN Data)
• achievements (10,000 messages resolved, £500m in savings)
• anniversaries
• releases

We can also ask Russell about this since we often have a coffee and a natter when he's up in Derbyshire.

We started talking about what kind of visual we could use for the patches/stickers. Nothing decided yet but we're both excited by all the ideas that were flowing. And also excited to be coming to the end of Milestone 3 and our first Deployment.

I guess the next Pub meeting will involve discussion about the path from Milestone 3 and Deployment 1 to Release 1.

[richardbirkin]

Why Mission Patch Stickers Matter

https://croydon.digital/2020/01/16/why-mission-patch-stickers-matter-and-how-to-get-a-croydon-digital-one/