The Quiet Period

Lead Advocacy Group: Release/Operations

The period between a deployment stabilized checkpoint and deployment completed checkpoint is sometimes referred to as a "quiet period." Typically, the duration of the quiet period is proportional to the stabilization period (e.g., typically, 20 percent of the duration but no shorter than 15 to 30 days long). The purpose of the quiet period is to measure how well a solution behaves in normal operations and to establish a baseline for understanding how much maintenance is required to run a solution. Typically, this is derived from information such as the number of incidents, the amount of downtime, and other various performance metrics. This data also helps form the assumptions used by an operations team to define the various Service Level Agreements (SLAs) on expected yearly levels of service and performance.

Although the remaining team members no longer have planned solution delivery activities, they continue with a project to respond to escalated issues while they shift focus to project closeout activities (discussed in the next chapter).