36 Changes is not a new web site, but rather a count of deployments by the team building Flickr, a photo web site owned by Yahoo. This isn't the deployments in a year, but rather in a week. I once worked at a company that deployed every Wednesday and we managed that across 18 months, which I thought was a pretty good pace. Thirty six deployments would have taken us the better part of a year. And I used to think we were extremely quick!
Hopefully this isn't every week, but would it be that bad if it was? I'm not sure, though I'd say that you can't have developers deploying every change they "think" is complete to the production systems. You would still need to have a good amount of QA and testing taking place.
If you could, however, bundle up 5 or 10 changes every few hours from a few developers into a release, then would it be a problem to send those to QA for the remainder of the day and then release them tomorrow if everything went well? That could be a sustainable pace, assuming you had the resources in both development and QA.
There's an article on Web 2.0 development that gives 5 lessons for building software in enterprises according to this new model. Most of the advice makes sense, though I was surprised to see them recommending more scripting languages than Java or .NET. That might make sense since web servers are cheap, hardware overall is cheap, and throwing more hardware up there to handle the scripting load rather than compiling things ahead of time might make sense. I hate to see people losing their skills at lower level languages like C and C++.
I've seen people worry about testing, but I don't think this requires shortcuts in testing. You have less to test because there are smaller deployments, less changes. Everything gets speeded up, and that should mean simpler, and hopefully better, testing.
Moving to this agile, or perhaps hyper-agile, world can work, though I think that it requires a fundamental culture change to implement. Clients, as well as technical people have to buy into this idea. I like it and think it makes more sense in a world where we often want to move forward, try things, and then see if they make sense. Especially when we're letting users and customers dictate those changes instead of developers or analysts.
Steve Jones
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