Reduce deployment cycle

Problems

• 2 weeks deployment cycle (+1 week on UAT)
• 4 weeks of development + deployment cycle (slow)
• slow dev cycle requires ad-hoc features (copy patch to release branch)
• master is  ahead of release branch for ~2 weeks
• ~2 weeks of changes: +20K lines added -8K lines removed

Semantic conflicts

Integration of code is additional change. More difference between branches - more risks. 

Reduce length of deployment cycle to one week

• Monday - deploy to UAT
• Tuesday
  • deploy to Prod
  • feature freeze and deploy to staging

Reduce length of deployment cycle to one week

from "todo" to "production" in 2 weeks

* assuming rolling average of 6 working days

Regression testing

Optimize regression test suite

Further optimizations

• Bugs root cause analysis
• Automate smoke tests after deploy (in progress)
• Review of test cases to find candidates for automation down to test pyramid