Abstract: The practice of continuous deployment enables product teams to release content to end users within hours or days rather than months or years. These faster deployment cycles, along with rich product instrumentation, allows product teams to capture and analyse feature usage measurements. Product teams define a hypothesis and a set of metrics to assess how a code or feature change will impact the user. Supported by a framework, a team can deploy that change to subsets of users, enabling randomized controlled experiments. Based on the impact of the change, the product team may decide to modify that change, to deploy the change to all users, or to abandon the change. This talk will provide an overview of deployment and experimental practices and will describe how these practices are applied by different product groups within Microsoft, identifying the benefit of these approaches and also practical issues associated with them.

Short Bio: Brendan Murphy is a principal Research at Microsoft Research Centre in Cambridge UK. Brendan works in the Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement group at Microsoft focusing on software reliability, dependability, quality and process issues. Recently Brendan’s research has focused on software development practices in general, focusing on deployment practices.