Accidentally released code to live. How to prevent happening again?

Question

We had an incident recently where some code got released to live that was not scheduled to be released.

It had obviously been checked into the trunk. Which is fine i guess as you want to 'check in early, check in often'.

However in this instance it was not supposed to be released in the next release.

What kind of checks / strategy / process can be put in place to avoid code being released to live prematurely.

It seems to me even with Continuous Integration and Unit Tests this is a human procedure issue?

-- Lee

Answer 1

Amend your integration procedures.

If "going live" means someone executing some batch script - don't be surprised if this will happen again.

Also, consider branching. A common example might be to use the trunk for development, a separate branch for testing (say, gets merged once a week), and a final branch (from the aforementioned testing branch) for RTC.

This branch, before being deployed to production, should be tested thoroughly.