To build on what others have said... Several things I'd recommend:
1) Automate your testing and do it up front. Project managers who still think in terms of the waterfall approach to development tend to place testing at the end of the project. Inevitably timelines get tight and testing gets cut. That's called short term gain for long term loss, because automated tests save SO much time when making changes in the various environments. A project that doesn't have automated tests will have to do days or weeks of manual testing when a change comes through (upgrading to a new version of Tomcat for a security patch, for example). 2) Automate, automate, automate. This goes beyond testing to all parts of your development, deployment, and promotion (moving from dev to test to staging to production) process. I would recommend using a good scripting language that has strong integration with Java. Ant has the strong integration but is a bad scripting language (in large part because it's a build tool). Jython or the new kid on the block Groovy, perhaps making calls to Ant classes, are better choices for automating your deployment and promotion processes. The more repeatable and automated they are, the less chance for human error, the less chance for downtime in production. 3) Production should have a maintenance window, a time when users know there may be changes going in. A window brings consistency to upgrades and eases the communication to the users as to when a particular change will go in. For example, some of our production servers have a maintenance window for 6 AM - 7 AM on Saturday morning, because that's the period of least use. Any changes to those servers go in during that time period, unless it's an absolute emergency (in which case there's a whole alternate approval/communication/notification process to follow). Hope those help. Kyle _____ Kyle Adams | Java Developer | Gordon Food Service | 616-717-6162 --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
