Last week I delivered a presentation at the Vancouver Software Developer Network meetup on the relationship between risk and frequent releases. In the presentation I proposed that building the capability to release software frequently (daily or weekly) actually reduces risk and that concerns about frequent releases are founded on a localized understanding of risk. You can find the slidecast for the presentation below.

Frequent Releases Reduce Risk
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My intention with the presentation was to lay out the basis for an argument that would be subsequently debated. This proved to be more challenging than my last presentation on frequent releases which more of an experience report. It’s difficult to clearly convey the layers of a logical argument through a presentation. I’m impressed by how lawyers manage to do it.

One of the things that I asked attendees to do was to list the top three things that are preventing them from releasing software every week. I’ve compiled their responses in the chart below:
frequent-releases

The results are hardly scientific, but I was heartened to see substantial overlap between the concerns that I addressed in the presentation and those identified by the audience. It turned out quite a large contingent of the audience are rich client developers, which brings its own shared of deployment headaches. Many are also working in regulated industries that require their software to be submitted to third party certification agencies for review. To those that attended the session, thanks for participating and for sharing your concerns with me.