Aravindan reports the final hours of  GroupDeal 2 launch….

 

Well, the final day has final come, GroupDeal 2. If you’re working along with GroupDeal Team you will start to feel the fire and the sweat even in well air-conditioned room!

It’s so intense, unlike other beta releases, this one has tons of new stuffs and fixes. Testers, Designers and of course, programmers working with great effort in finding and fixing even the tiniest issues.

For our other teams, however, it can be a once in a lifetime experience to see our team so busy never before – and they don’t know what to expect, because know other team seen the all-new GroupDeal.

Here’s a little background on what goes on – during GroupDeal Beta launch.

15th November

It’s Tuesday 10AM; we’re are brisk, bright and ready for the day we waited for. All the works and efforts we did for last 2 months gonna pay off today. We got 12 hours to launch GroupDeal 2 to our main server, in perfect working conditions. All our success for 2 lies in the last few hours

T-12 Hours — 10:00am

We quickly assembled for our usual Scrum meeting, but, this one is quite serious, we know there is no room for errors today. No matter what, we need to launch GroupDeal as perfect as possible. TL and Module Leads taken the checklist and final issues we need to do, before the guys in the QA team shoot us with bugs. We know any critical bug will cancel the today launch which gonna spoil our reputation (which not gonna happen). All comes to this final showoff.

The tasks has been taken and sorted with our team members and design related stuffs forwarded to the Design Team.

T-10 Hours — 12:00pm

Everything going smoothly and it’s gonna be a perfect launch or at least that’s what we thought. Flooded with mails from our PM, soon ended our dreams of ‘happy ending’. Module Leads now started taking the lists of issues from the mail and went for discussion, leaving their current works behind.

After the discussion, our pending list increased, which we know, will delay the launch.

T-08 Hours — 2:00pm

It’s lunch; we cooled off our heads, filled our stomachs and renewed our energy, we know today gonna be very tough and long. But, we never lost our motivation and faith, this is what we are worked all this time, for this day. With high spirit, we went back to our cabins to continue our efforts for the launch.

T-07 Hours — 3:00pm

With our preplanned works for the launch, finally they entered, QA Team, testers. Unless they say it’s OK, we are doomed. As expected, we’re bombed with last minute issues and bugs. Planning changed again.

Our team members are scrambled with issues and we started to fix high priority issues first. Fixing them might turn QA team happy and they might even say a GO!

T-08 Hours — 4:00pm

Like “B-5 Bomber”, our TL and Module Leads filled with further mails from PM. Discussion and planning kept on going. Finally, it’s confirmed; today launch will surely be delayed. And we planned for the worst, we have to stay back today night.

T-06 Hours — 6:00pm

We changed our strategy in working, ‘Control’ first. Planning changed further and mixed all the mails and issues posted by QA & PM and grouped by priority-wise and developer-wise. Task list has been split among the developers based on their depth knowledge of GroupDeal.

Finally, everything started to turn smoothly, lots of major issues and last minute enhancements works have been done. We’re relieved and started seeing the colorful dreams about GroupDeal 2.

T-06 Hours — 10:00pm

Everyone started to leave, and we started to feel hungry. Since the delay is inevitable, we went for dinner. We rode with our bikes to the nearest Hotel Raj Bhavan and ordered parotta, the only thing which is available fast and fills the gap in our stomach for long. Even though it was so tasty, the bill is really shocking, almost double price than we normal used to eat. We rode back to work, but, stopped in between to buy some snacks for the night. Everyone in our team is great ‘snack-eaters’, so we bought a lot (I mean it!). After all the munching and fun talks, the final showdown started.

16th November — 12:00am

It’s midnight; our past launch time line changed. We set for 6-hours for the launch. Everyone, from Developers to Design Team, working like a full recharged battery. We are sure that launch done will be done!

T-01 Hours — 05:00am

Everything has been take care off, all issue list and mails. We’re started working final checking list. Split among ourselves we checked all the modules and everything went smoothly. Our thoughts are the same now, “…any time now”, for the launch.

T-10minutes — 05:50am

It’s nail-biting time. If there is the slightest chance that any issues pops up, QA gonna “march down” to put us on hold! Thank god they don’t have too, because none available! We are very relieved and happy!

Launched!!! — 06:00am

All our team members reported positive to launch the site. Our TL started the upload to the main server and configuring started. The final and last most important work is, ‘Sample data’. Good sample data makes client happy (also for us!). After adding tons of ‘em everything is done!!!

We are so happy that our hard work finally paid off with the success of GroupDeal 2. We are so happy and sleepy, our blogs we were published, even though there is a delay it’s good that we taken care of the hidden issues thanks to QA and finally it’s time to say, GroupDeal 2 launch was a success!