Release Management - releasing to a subset of users - how would it work for a public facing website

Question

I read somewhere (sorry don\'t exactly remember the source) that facebook has release Tuesdays. They release the new features to their internal employees first, then to a sm

Answer 1

I really thought this question would have received a lot more attention. Considering what you said and the existing answers, I think your existing solution is the most straight forward and easiest to manage. As you said, there is some "design smell" (I like that phrase) but it makes the most sense.

Perhaps going one step further and combining some slight modifications of the suggestions with your own:

• Keep your existing database version convention
• Release specific candidate versions to either a sub-domain candidate01.yoururl.com or a specific server if you have a server farm
• Use a flag on your user/member table to indicate which production server or sub-domain the user should be directed to
  • Provides the ability to direct some users to the release candidate server(s)
  • Doesn't require the amount of code the per feature coding option mentioned in DK's answer would (you could go either way though depending on how targeted you want to be but I think the least complicated route would be best here and would direct users to specific versions of the app rather than try to turn individual features on/off per user)

Other than that, great question! Oh yes, and when that is all ready you just flip the fluger switch to engage the double buffer mechanism and you are all set.