Continuous(ish) Delivery of Meadow Libraries

It wasn’t too long ago that the release process for the Meadow stack was…let’s just call it horribly inefficient. From when we decided “time to ship a build” to when NuGets were available was literally measured in days. It was a process that we actually feared internally because of all of the fragile moving parts that had to align just right.

Since those days, we’ve spent a lot of thought and effort as a team on improving that flow. Not counting the OS release (which has also improved but has its own set of challenges) our managed stack release now takes about 30 minutes start-to-finish and is mostly a process of “click a button and keep an eye on it.” It’s still occasionally hits a glitch that requires some manual intervention, but it has largely become an easy, reliable process.

Since we now have a simplified process, we’re moving toward a more predictable and reliable release cadence. We have started shipping the full Meadow managed stack – so everything available through NuGet – every Tuesday.

We’re still working on test automation, so not every release gets a full vetting. Releases that have not gone through our full test procedures will be marked as Beta releases but still provide developers access to functional parity with our active develop branches.

Part of our mission is to help accelerate our customers’ development of IoT solutions, and providing the latest features as fast as we can develop them is just another part of fulfilling that promise. We continue to drive toward a faster, more robust release cadence for all of our products because it can only make our, and your, products better. If you have ideas or thoughts on how we can improve our processes, feel free to file a suggestion or let us know over on Slack.