Release It! - Chapter 7 Case Study: Trampled by Your Own Customers

In this chapter, the author describes a death march web site project that crashed after 25 minutes of going live. The application was written to pass QA's test, not go into production. There were 500 integration points and every single configuration file was written for an integration envrionment, which included hostnames, ports and passwords.  Some code assumed QA's network topology and not what was going into production.  They tested the application the way it was meant to be used, not like it was used in the real world. Shopbots, search engines and other non-human users had an impact on the system.  No safeties were built into to cut the system off from bad things.  Over time, they adapted the system to meet demand using less resources than they initially went live with.  Getting there, however, was a long and painful process.