It has been my experience that homegrown applications can present a number of challenges as they expand and evolve. One of these challenges is the absence of a defined build and release schedule. A homegrown application that I currently manage has evolved over the years into a massive system that is accessed around the clock by users worldwide. Because it has evolved so much over the years, there has been a great deal of interpretation left to different teams as to how builds and releases should be handled.

To add a little more flavor to the situation, this application is not written in Java, the long-standing development platform of choice at the Church. It is written in a mixture of classic ASP and ASP.NET, something that has only recently been adopted as an acceptable platform here. Due to the efforts of strong development and QA teams, we’ve seen an increase in application stability and improvements in overall functionality as we’ve worked to get this homegrown behemoth under control. We have now come to another fork in the improvement road: an acceptable release process.

Add Comment

Read more...


Continue reading at the original source →