Custard Melt

I think we have five instances of Melt running at the moment. This morning we decided to introduce another one, to use as our demonstration instance for our forthcoming launch event (see next post for details). We'll also be adding another one so we can implement a new look and feel without getting in the way of development. Adding another instance means running a single one line script.

It was, needless to say, a bit of effort to get this stuff set up in the first place. Our official 'Iteration 0' when you're supposed to do this took three days. In practice we've been tweaking the setup ever since. But in the final analysis this is much less effort than attempting to create and synchronise even a handful of instances without the automated procecess.

Having this kind of environment available is a pre-requisite for agile development. The developers need a development instance. The customer needs an instance which shows the latest work the developers have checked in so they can offer feedback and input. The testers need an instance which shows the work ready for user acceptance testing - the UAT instance. We also have our public instance, which shows the last signed off iteration to the world at large.

It's not just the automation of the instance creation that makes it such a keystone of agile practices though. The automation of testing saves days of time, and most importantly means that when changes to one part of the system introduce bugs elsewhere we catch them sooner rather than later.

I'm sure other development methodologies would benefit from similar levels of automation, and probably do. As far as I know Microsoft aren't agile, but they do do daily builds for all their software development. If there's a key to all of this it's probably this. If you have to do something once, do it yourself, if you have to do it twice, get the machine to do it.