Challenges with E-Delivery: What Strategies Can Help Ensure Reliable Software Releases?

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I’m currently facing significant challenges with our e-delivery process that seem to impact the reliability and speed of our software releases. Despite thorough testing and successful build completions, we often encounter issues during deployment that lead to delays and frustration among team members and stakeholders.

Here are some specific challenges we’re experiencing:

  1. Inconsistent Build Artifacts: Different environments sometimes deploy artifacts that don’t match what was tested, causing discrepancies in behavior.
  2. Communication Gaps: There seems to be a disconnect between the development and QA teams regarding the status and readiness of builds for delivery.
  3. Deployment Failures: We often see unexpected failures during e-delivery that weren’t caught during testing, which leads to rollbacks and increased downtime.
  4. Dependency Management: Handling external dependencies (like APIs and libraries) can be tricky, and changes in those can break our deployments unexpectedly.

I would love to hear from the community about:

  • Strategies you’ve implemented to improve the reliability of e-delivery.
  • Tools that have helped you streamline the build and deployment process.
  • Best practices for communication between development and QA teams to ensure alignment on deployment readiness.
  • Ways to effectively manage dependencies and ensure consistent environments.

Any insights or experiences you could share would be greatly appreciated!

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Hi Ramanan,
there seem to be a lot of possible problems both in process and technical ones.
First of all I don’t see Testing (or Development) responsible for the decision to release - that should be done by a Release or Project Manager. Development builds the software, Testing judges the quality but to release it needs an additional process.
Bugs after testing could be the problem of late changes, done without testing. A way to prevent that would be a process where merges into the main branch are done only with consent by a tester (and a developer). If there is no further communication between testing and development I suggest a weekly if not daily meeting to discuss the board/plan/JIRA whatever you have to track issues.
When outside API calls constantly change I see no way but to either communicate with the providers. Or to mock them and change these APIs shortly before final testing.

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