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David

I use BlogLines to read my RSS subscriptions. It’s pretty good, and now that the performance issues I had initially seem to have gone away, I like it a lot. It’s very handy to be able to read my feeds…

Note that I didn’t say the release was 100% smooth – it wasn’t. In particular, it was delayed for 24 hours after it failed the production shakedown due to odd behaviour we didn’t see in test regions (which I still can only describe and workaround, not explain).

The main thing is that we knew that if there was a problem that we could pull it down and fix it rapidly – which we did.

As to Wotif’s attitude: we are scared about releases that are not stable. Wotif did about $250 million in revenue last year through the site, and we’re looking to do about $330m this year. So we’re edging up to a million dollars of revenue a day. A million dollars of revenue is a bit over $40,000 an hour. Nobody at Wotif wants to be responsible for interrupting the cashflow that much.

That said, we aren’t that concerned about pushing software out if we feel it is ready. We do have extensive Q/A procedures (regretably manual at the moment, but we are working on it), plus an exhaustive array of performance tests. We always make sure that any release is reversable (which can be interesting for database schema changes). In the time I’ve been at Wotif, I think we’ve yanked a release back twice – one other time we rolled a hotfix out _really_ fast.

We certainly don’t have an extensive layer of red-tape to get through. All we need are three people to agree: the B/A for the themed release (to certify the feature set is acceptable), the lead tester for the release (to sign off that the test plans were executed, and all known issues are registered or fixed) and the lead developer for the release (as a veto, actually). When they agree, we go out. The B/A and tester roles rotate regularly, the lead developer one less often.

All that said: being able to monetise the risk helps us assess the extent to which we should be concerned.

Do you get any “nerves” around these releases? Or is the fact that they are regular releases a comforting factor that helps keep everyone focussed?

I have found that in some environments (namely more corporate ones) the layers of ass-covering involved means the political cost of a bug or small failure is so high that any release is terrifying.

What is wotif’s attitude to just “getting a feature out there” and accepting a risk of a (recoverable) failure (after all, it is a web app, can update the software whenever you want). I know that Amazon take the attitude that the cost of a mistake is generally less then the cost of missing the opportunity out of fear of the mistake – this is unique to eBay/Amazon/Wotif style of “apps” of course.

Jason Fried also talked about it a bit. Although with Wotif, with real money flowing through transactions, perhaps the stakes are a bit higher !