The Publishing Process

Patch day: These words strike terror into the hearts of players all over the world and with good reason; the industry doesn't have a great record of stable patches, nor one of informing the players just what changes will be made in each one. More often than not, patches aren't well- tested , they are filled with bugs, and they contain wagonloads of unannounced changes, some of which look like bugs to the uninformed players.

In previous chapters, we discussed cowboy programming and other bad development practices that foster this kind of self-defeating chain of events. If the producer of the live team can manage to control the team's cowboy programming and its equally noxious, shoot-from-the-hip cousins, it will be by strict enforcement of a publishing process. The publishing process structures fixes of the current/old code, design changes, and additions that represent new code, plans for QA testing, and lays out when and when not to do an emergency patch.