Eating Raw Dog Food

By Mike Cannon-Brookes|Uncategorized|1 Comment

Charles wrote up one of my worse meeting metaphors on our developer blog in his post “Keep ‘em clean boys”:http://blogs.atlassian.com/developer/2007/02/keep_em_clean_boys.html.
Frustration when viewed in a blog post’s cold light of day is a fascinating thing!
The salient point though is that the “Confluence”:http://www.atlassian.com/software/confluence team is using the latest development code for our internal enterprise wiki.
We eat our own dogfood, even before it’s fully cooked.
h4. How?
Our extranet gets updated twice a week. We’ve worked hard to make the update process as painless as possible. It’s two commands I believe and takes about 20 minutes to run, including doing a full backup of the data. If the process was more painful, we would naturally do it less. Building _release discipline_ into a software team is a hard thing to do, this helps us get better at it.
h4. Why?
The natural question people ask is “Doesn’t that cost you money when bugs cause downtime / errors?”.
The simple answer is “Yes, but it costs less than the support from 2,500 Confluence enterprise customers having the same downtime.”
The longer answer is that _because_ we know we’re going to update twice a week, we try to keep our… code clean at all times. Developers _know_ their code is going live very soon, so they don’t leave loose ends hanging around.
No “90% complete” here.