Software Upgrades Once More

Importance of software upgrades is burned deep in the back of my mind probably since I was responsible for release management. Now I’m biased and I look at every upgrade of software I use wearing a hat of vendor deployment team. That brings rants mostly (Google Reader, Blogger, Adobe Reader are on the list; hey I'm really a kind of frustrated man or something), but it appears that there’s always a good time to remind about the risk of upgrades and importance of doing it well.

Irritating the user definitely isn’t the highest punishment you can receive. NASA has just sent their 220-million worth Mars Global Surveyor to the space dump because of software bug invited by the upgrade (Szymon, thanks for the link).

You can guess how the unlucky developer now feels like. I wouldn’t want to be in quality assurance or deployment team either.

Remember about that when next time you’ll be trying to skip some steps or milestones during upgrade process.