Mike Davidson’s thoughts on code promotion schedules have generated a number of interesting comments. Essentially, he began by questioning whether two weeks is too long or too short for releasing Web site improvements. There’s a lot of back-and-forth debating the meaning of “code” but most agree that it depends. (Anil Dash’s clarification of Vox’s scheduling explains in detail how good updates should be managed.)

For the record, at The Globe and Mail we:

• do regular front-end maintenance updates, generally early in the day, whenever needed;
• do regular back-end updates near the end of the week, when needed;
• and do database updates early on a weekend day every couple weeks, when required.

Project-based updates are dictated by the the business, marketing, and development deadlines and released only after a period of QA testing. Not coming from a programming background, I didn’t see the reason for such fixed schedules. But the general stability of such releases has finally (well, almost) won me over.