Rule #35 - Try not to release on a Friday

2015/01/01 Tags: development

One of the things about being a software developer is that you quickly accrue a collection of “rules” that you won’t necessarily read in a book. One of these is: “Try not to release on a Friday.”

The obvious reason is you don’t leave yourself enough time to rapidly fix any problems that your users might discover, leaving a broken product until at least sometime Monday.

Yes, I agree, a proper QA process, with careful and deliberate deployment practices is a must. And this will indeed protect you from repeated bad releases. So that’s a given. But it won’t avoid the unforeseen problems that lurk in any moderately complex product.

You’re playing Russian roulette and it’s prudent to prepare for the worst.

And the most obvious plan is release earlier in the week. Simple.

(Until, well, you know, it’s absolutely vital that this release goes out 5:55PM Friday, because if it doesn’t something terrible is going to happen. If you’re arguing this, we need to have a little chat…)

All of this rambling was inspired by Barclays Bank’s Android app.

They decided to update their app a few weeks before Christmas. It seems to have been released on a Sunday, so on paper, so far, so good. But then the bad happened. Lots of users started reporting problems. The excellent App Annie provides a great way to illustrate what happened:

Over the last month, out of 539 reviews, 331 (61%) were 1-star, with an overall overage for this period of 2.0 stars. This is compared to their previous average of 3.9 stars.

Some of the complaints were due to the appearance of the new version (not good), but I’m ignoring this as design changes can often be polarising to existing users. And there’s the long-standing issue that they refuse to allow their app to run on rooted devices. If you read the reviews, the far more serious issues are that for many, many users the app is not functional. They range across auth failures, ANRs, incorrect identification of being rooted, fatal exceptions and broken functionality. (Disclaimer: for me personally, I can no longer see my account transactions.)

Their last release was December 7th which seems to have fixed little. Since then… silence.

I suspect that the development team would not have been so slow to react at any other time of year, especially one on behalf of such a prestigious financial company. In the mean time, the star rating of their app continues to plummet.

So to my “Friday releases” rule I now add “Beware releasing just before the holidays”.

And Barclays need a better QA process.