Code freezes are a critical practice for developers, particularly during periods of high-anticipated traffic. By halting changes or updates to the website, developers aim to ensure stability during these peak times.
Particularly in the context of e-commerce, the most common code freeze is during the holiday season. To ensure the user experience doesn’t get negatively impacted or no accidental hiccups are introduced in the shopper journey, developers refrain from pushing any new code live during this time when businesses witness high volumes of traffic.
While a code freeze can act as a safety net, it doesn’t guarantee a 100% error-free site, especially when traffic volumes surge beyond usual levels.
Here are some best practices to ensure your code freeze is implemented successfully:
Code Freeze Best Practices
Start planning ahead of time to complete high-priority projects before the freeze
Jumping into a code freeze without preparation is a recipe for disaster. Begin planning well in advance to wrap up high-priority launches before the freeze. Use time as your competitive advantage to leave your website in its most stable state. Create a workback schedule to complete crucial projects early and deprioritize less important tasks until after the holiday season.
Leverage the downtime to uncover opportunities for optimization
Use the code freeze period to identify long-term improvement opportunities. Audit your backlog and prioritize strategic projects for after the peak season. Brainstorm ways to optimize site performance, better utilize your tech stack, streamline processes, and tackle low-priority projects that have been on hold.
Continue to monitor your site for any errors that may pop up
A common misconception is that a code freeze makes your site immune to bugs or glitches. While it prevents new errors caused by updates or releases, it doesn’t protect against existing issues. Continuous monitoring for errors that might affect the customer journey is essential even during a code freeze.
The State of Website Errors During a Code Freeze
The holiday season is the busiest time of the year, and eliminating friction from the customer journey is crucial. At Noibu, we help our customers leverage our platform during a code freeze to stay ahead of technical errors, customer complaints, and recurring issues, ensuring a delightful shopping experience. Here’s how Noibu can help during a code freeze:
Level Up Your Customer Support
During the holiday season, higher traffic can lead to more customer complaints and inquiries. Use Noibu’s session tracking as a diagnostic tool for your support team. Investigate complaints quickly by finding a user’s session in Noibu to determine if there’s a legitimate bug or if it’s an issue on the customer’s end.
Provide your support team with direct access to Noibu or set up a process for relaying this information to the technical team.
To streamline this process further and make it easier to find a specific user session, ask the customer to generate a Help Code. This gives your developers a numerical code to quickly retrieve the problematic session.
To find a specific session without the help code, you’ll need to filter the list of sessions by details specific to the customer’s experience. Noibu also has a software development kit (SDK) that lets you set custom attributes, like a customer ID or order ID to more easily search through sessions.
Get Ahead with QA
Even if new code isn’t deployed to your live site, you can still push updates to your staging domain. Use Noibu on your staging domain to uncover and resolve bugs before they reach production.
Setting up a staging domain in Noibu is straightforward and free. Utilize this time to double down on QA and ensure that live site changes are error-free.
Audit Your Backlog of Issues
A code freeze is a great time to review your issues dashboard in Noibu to ensure everything is marked in the right state. Check if issues marked as Open or In-Progress have been resolved or need to be marked as Closed-Fixed.
If any issues marked as Closed-Fixed are still occurring, reopen them and assign them to the development team. If any issues marked under Closed-Ignore are negatively impacting customers, consider reopening them to ensure the right fix is deployed.
Continue to Monitor Alerts for Priority Issues
Remember, a code freeze doesn’t mean errors won’t occur. Continue to monitor email alerts from Noibu and regularly check the Priority View on the Issues page.
There could always be errors that occur due to the misfiring of a third-party script or simply because of the high traffic influx. By monitoring for those alerts regularly, you can deploy fixes in real-time and prevent any major impact on customer experience or revenue.
Have a Successful Holiday Season with Noibu
The holiday season is crucial for your business. With Noibu monitoring your site, you can have peace of mind knowing a reliable system is in place, ensuring no bug goes undetected.
If you face any issues or would like to understand how you can utilize the platform better during the holiday season, please reach out to our support team at support@noibu.com.
