Scott Hartsman - Off the Record

To paraphrase a smart guy named Jake Smith:

“The act of moving files from Point A to Point B, where Point B is your live environment, is a process that merits being QA’ed all on its own. Twice.”

Downsides:

• If you’ve set up your environments in a way where this is as hands-off, just-push-a-button as it can possibly be, this can still result in an hour or four of extra time spent for every single update.
• Maintaining a dedicated environment in which to do this redundantly costs money in hardware, and in people’s time, in perpetuity.
• Those hours are frequently very boring for everyone involved.
• It’s very seldom that anything actually goes wrong.
• The temptation to skip doing it can be unbearable when you’ve promised that your game will be available at a certain time. Especially when you easily can do the math in your head and know that doing this will push you past that time. No one wants to disappoint their customers by being late.

Upside:

• This doesn’t happen.

I have no idea if this is actually what happened in this situation, but this is another one of those pieces of information that I’d like to make sure I never forget about.

My sympathies to the folks on both sides of it here. Good luck in getting it all worked out.

- Scott