Releasing an application into the wild is always a great feeling. The weeks, days and hours leading up to the launch can be pressure packed as the last design tweaks are made and final QA fixes are applied. Managed properly though, a launch should also bring you closer to your teammates and clients, at least it always has for me. 

There's been a noticeable shift in the last couple of years about constitutes what a "successful" launch. Long gone are the days of releasing huge, mega-feature rich applications (well, you won't ever catch us releasing something like that!). In their place, we are launching leaner apps in far less time that are then iterated quickly in response to real feedback. These subsequent "mini-releases" really keep us on our toes. Simplicity and clarity will always trump complexity and bloat for us.

The days and weeks that follow a launch are all to easy to overlook - but they are arguably more important than the launch itself. Overly long development cycles can easily lead to reduced effort and motivation post-launch. Issues and bugs happen. Handle them in timely, clever and upfront manner and your users will appreciate your application even more. We've found the best way to guarantee that we can do just that is to keep our development cycles short (it's rare that we'll go more than a month between releases).

The list of available tools and services that encourage and facilitate these new "rules" is seriously impressive.  Whether it's error reporting, project management, performance tuning or issue tracking, "there's an app for that". There's an almost endless list of great applications now available and here are some of our favourites:

1. GitHub
2. Basecamp
3. Hoptoad (great name, great app)
4. Redmine
5. New Relic

Each one of these applications share a similar philosophy when it comes to releases, with new features being introduced on a regular basis in response to user feedback. We wouldn't want to launch without them!

Bryan Mahoney - Bryan is Dynamo's Director of Technology, continually breaking new ground evaluating, developing and guiding our sites and webapps, & a pillar in Dynamo's client service front. Co-author of 2 early books on the integration of ColdFusion and Flash, he is an expert in database driven content management and design. Bryan now principally rides Ruby on Rails.