The holiday code freeze

It’s that time of year again where teams everywhere are considering a code freeze for the holiday season. Should we have one? How long for? What will we do while our code is frozen? Will we have lots to merge in January, and how will we manage that?

I’m not going to say whether you should or shouldn’t have one - that’s up to you! - but a colleague made a great point: Should we be doing something to ensure that long code freezes are not necessary?

And I think that’s the right question to ask! A long code freeze is a strong indicator that the team lacks confidence when making changes to production.

Increasing that confidence will help you ship faster with fewer incidents all year round.