How do YOU ensure that a client's Drupal site launch goes off without a hitch? If you are the stakeholder, what are the best ways to keep your team on the right path to a seamless launch of unparallelled elegance?

Everyone remembers the lump in their throats around launch time; the rush to finish content, make final theme tweaks, adjust for sudden browser weirdness. As momentum picks up, change requests appear, databases are slingshot hither and yon, while everyone scrambles to resolve merge conflicts like a Tokyo train at rush hour.

We emerge scarred but smarter, intent on making the next launch less painful. But with different teams launching different sites, it can be hard to establish an iterative process. Especially as new work accumulates in the backlog, we reap what we sow in technical debt from rushed launches, quick & dirty choices made under the gun, and unimplemented ideas from retrospectives.

At Pantheon, however, Scott, Timani and the Customer Success team are launching several enterprise sites per week, while simltaneously assisting hundreds of self serve customers when they need a hand. Because we need to work effectively, we have developed the tools and process to ensure:

• Great site performance on day one
• Less problems over the long run
• Clear expectations from informed stakeholders

The session will cover other key areas:

• Preparing for launch for the PM, Stakeholder, Developer & Sys Admin
• Auditing the site for landmines, carniverous acid pool islands, and deadweight
• Load testing to obliterate surprises with actionable results

This session is platform agnostic; whether you use PaaS, shared hosting, or wield your own hardware, PMs, developers, and clients will leave with new tools in their belt to launch with less agita. We will share some of our challenges and how we overcame them, and hopefully hear from you about how you overcame yours!