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Infrastructure First

This is part of the One Pagers series.

2009-08-17

The Problem:

How do we smooth out deployment/testing/integration/etc?

Implement all infrastructure first.

Start with using idiomatic project structure so there is no learning curve.
Implement your basic test suite, starting with a sanity test. Get it to pass.
Implement deployment automation and actually deploy (blanks) several times.
Write all your project and deployment documentation up front. If any of it takes more than a few sentences, you’ve failed.
- Test it on a newb who’s never seen your project before.
- Watch them try it out. Everytime they mess up is a failure on your part.
Almost all of this should be made into a template so it is reused next time.
Nothing should be much more complicated than:

% scm checkout projectname
% rake newb env:test deploy

If it is, it is still too complicated and can (and should) be cleaned up.