Code Must Now Be "Promoted" Through Four Environments Before Production; One Commit Passed Over Again
The commit, a one-line copy fix, has watched three younger features move to production ahead of it.
RALEIGH, N.C. — Under a continuous-promotion system adopted this summer, code at insurance software firm Tessellate no longer deploys to production but is instead "promoted" through development, staging, pre-production and canary environments, a process that one small commit has now been waiting to complete for 19 days.
The commit, which changes the word "Recieve" to "Receive" on a settings page, was built on August 31 and promoted to development the same afternoon. It has not moved since, while 23 later builds, including a payments feature and a full redesign of the dashboard, passed through every stage and reached customers.
"Promotion is not automatic past staging," explained release engineer Priyanka Sood. "A human clicks. The humans have been clicking on the big things. Nobody has clicked on 'Receive.' It is not that we do not value it. It is that it is very easy to not notice."
The system, which tracks every build as an immutable bundle of artifacts and shows the pipeline as a visual board, has been credited with making deploys "boring" and rollbacks "instant," and engineers say they like it. They also say the board has made the situation with "Receive" impossible to ignore, since the commit appears at the far left of the screen with a small clock icon that has been there so long "it feels like a colleague."
A campaign to promote the commit has gathered 34 emoji reactions in the engineering channel. A senior engineer proposed bundling it with the next feature "so it can ride along," a practice the release team formally discourages.
At press time, the settings page still read "Recieve," and the commit's clock icon had begun to render in a slightly darker shade the tool's documentation does not mention.