Steve Johnson posted a link today to a Product Management survey being run by one of his friends at Kent State.
So I clicked the link to participate in the survey. And here’s what I got from the survey site:
(click to enlarge)
So here’s what I don’t get. It’s Thursday night, about 10:15 PM Eastern Time. That’s 7:15 PM Pacific Time (the same time zone in which Zoomerang’s offices are located). Who upgrades their hosted web application on a Thursday evening?
Seems rather braindead to me. Anyone know why they’d do this?
Saeed
On Product Management 
Because if there are any problems they can get them fixed during Friday and thus won’t have to work the weekend.
Maybe Friday is their slowest day of the week and Monday is the busiest. This lets them get an eval of the release on Friday without the risk of having it really kill them on a Monday.
Hi,
Typically SaaS or hosted app companies will do this work some time over Saturday night in North America. This typically minimizes disruption for users regardless of location worldwide.
As for having Friday to test, well, that’s what Sunday morning is for. 🙂
Doing this on a Thursday evening is simply odd. I’ve never heard of SaaS or similar company having a planned outage midweek.
Saeed
Maybe it wasn’t planned.
Well…the scenario I called out above is exactly our story. We have an enterprise SaaS offering where our Saturday/Sunday usage is almost nil and Monday is our heaviest traffic. This is one of the reasons why we will often plan for maintenance outages on Thursday. We do it later than 7:15 Pacific, but this schedule works well for us. We can get real world usage on a Friday where the impact of any issues that might have slipped through QA will be far less than they would be on a Monday. Doing it over the weekend doesn’t buy us anything since Sat/Sun site traffic is negligible.
Thanks for the insight Ja.
This is interesting. All of the SaaS companies I’ve dealt with have a clear weekend (Friday night or Saturday night) policy for their updates etc.
Saeed
I know many companies do updates on thursday evenings. I believe the reason is that if there is a major problem it can be identified on the Friday, and hopefully fixed during the weekend. Also many SLA’s no only count downtime in business hours monday-friday and the risk is therefor lower.
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When I worked in SaaS, we had upgrades on the weekends. We published the upgrade windows in advance (2nd and 4th Saturdays, if I recall). We didn’t always do an upgrade, but customers knew that was the window they would occur in, so that they could plan accordingly.
Now that I work with on-premise products, we typically release our software on any day, Monday-Thursday. Since our customers install the software at their location on their schedule, they can select whatever time/day they want. We don’t roll out our releases on Fridays to avoid any last minute issues that require rolling folks into the office (metaphorically) on the weekend, should a customer choose to install on a Friday at 4pm and run into an issue.