Why in the world do people/companies/etc. release on Fridays? It makes no sense from a time or problem solving perspective.
Consider this: You spend an entire sprint or two preparing the next set of app updates, to only find out after pushing it into production that there is a critical bug that was uncovered. Now, if you’ve setup your production environment correctly, you more than likely are able to rollback to the previous release with the use of Capistrano or some other tool. If you haven’t, well, then your developers and QA get an enjoyable weekend of not having a weekend 🙂
I highly suggest any serious company looking to minimize their employees stress, to do releases on Tuesday mornings. You get nearly the entire week to fix any issue and push the changes back out to production before the weekend without sacrificing your employees time off. There won’t be any disrupting your employees personal lives anymore than they already are, so as a result your employees will be happier.
The mindset of releasing on Friday’s I think is because of this innate human condition to want some type of closure at the end of something, such as the work week. Where-in you can release it, and then goof off the rest of the day at work, unless there is an issue in production then you know you may have no weekend and still have to work on Friday. I think most people can agree that actually breaking many of our psychological habits, are what will make us better at what we do, and be better poised to move forward with what we’re working on.
Just because something is what’s always been done, or something is the norm, doesn’t make it better or even the best solution. And in this scenario, I think it’s a horrible solution.