Continuous Deployment, Code Review and Pre-Tested Commits on Digg4
One of the exciting things, from a development perspective, about Digg4 is continuous deployment - when developers fix a bug or add a new feature, there's no need to wait for a scheduled release. Instead, the change can go live right away. This is great - the turnaround time for a change drops dramatically. But this also opens up the possibility of broken changes going live, since there won't be manual testing and signoffs before the changes go live. Figuring out how to balance the speed and agility of continuous deployment with the requirements for stability and reliability has been, and continues to be, a major challenge for us here. Over the last couple months, we've rolled out a workflow which we believe helps achieve that balance without sacrificing an excess of stability or agility.