Shipping software should feel like a win.
Instead, for too many engineering teams, the post-release routine resembles a funeral march:
- Weeks of post-release fixes and firefighting
- Engineers kept on high alert waiting for the next alert to sound
- An exhausting loop of incident reviews, PIRs, and post-mortems after every single event
- The lingering dread that you might have to pull the release back entirely
You don’t want a post-mortem after every deployment. Nobody does.
When release aftermath feels like a slow, painful grind, the problem isn’t your developers’ dedication. It’s a delivery process that treats deployment as an all-or-nothing gamble instead of a routine, low-risk habit.
High-performing teams make deployments boring:
- They decouple deployments from feature releases with feature flags.
- They limit blast radius with canary traffic before rolling out to 100%.
- They rely on automated rollbacks instead of late-night heroics.
If your post-release checklist feels like an endless mourning ritual, it’s time to rethink how you ship.
What does the first 48 hours after a release look like on your team: business as usual, or high-alert triage?
#EngineeringLeadership #DevOps #SoftwareDelivery #ContinuousDelivery #TechLeadership
#QA,#QualityAssurrance,#SoftwareTesting,#SoftwareTestingStrategy,#TASSQ,#NVP
@Neil Price-Jones,@jeremy Berriault
https://www.linkedin.com/newsletters/7399187902221443072
www.nvp.ca; www.berriaultandassociates.com
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