My team has this one shared component that gets involved in like every feature’s development. This year, we’re loading like 5 different features onto it, all with different timelines, and my head’s about to explode trying to figure out how to make it all fly.
How does everyone else do their software releases? Do you freeze prod and then do one big release later? Throw everything into prod during dev, hope no one sees the unreleased stuff, and just announce it later? Or something else entirely?
This isn’t what I do, but it’s my recommendation: assign a dev to be “release manager” for that feature. Make it their responsibility to monitor the branches of that feature and to carefully merge and QA them (and kick a branch back to the dev if compatibility spent fit with the other branches).
Here’s what I actually do: try to get my feature done first and push to the integration testing branch before anyone else. This usually results in my feature getting “accidentally” overwritten, so I keep a backup of my code until we’re released to Prod.
Release management with that many hands in the pot is just difficult.
The smaller the release, the better. You don’t want to do a big bang release and have to figure out which of the 20 things you just released is having a problem.
Otherwise, your case sounds like it could use feature flags. Develop your feature and release it through all environments, but keep it turned off in production until you are ready to use it.
Depends on your software stack.
If your delivery needs a one week installation/upgrade (in say every hospital using your softs, and they all are using different subsets) then you should not release as small as possible releases but match your capacities of men on the ground, people channeling problems, quick bug fixing, etc etc.
