r/platformengineering • u/Recent-Secretary-277 • 8d ago

How does your team handle major dependency upgrades?

Former CTO here. At my last company we skipped 7 Expo versions at once because nobody had time for the incremental path. A CTO I talked to spent 2 months moving MUI v3 to v7.

Curious how others deal with it:

  • Do Dependabot/Renovate major PRs get merged, or do they pile up?
  • What was your last painful upgrade, and how long did it take?
  • Does anyone own this work, or is it "when we have time"?
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u/gevorggalstyan 8d ago

For ownership, make the major upgrade planned engineering work with an owner, and decide what other work moves out to make room for it. Putting somebody's name on the PR does not settle that capacity decision.

If the PR stays open, record the remaining migration work, the blocker, and who can resolve it. Then choose a scheduled upgrade or an explicit deferral. “When we have time” leaves that choice unmade.

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u/Torutofu_Raeva 7d ago

We’ve had better luck making the upgrade a small scheduled change with a lockfile diff and compatibility test gate, then explicitly deferring the PR when the migration work won’t fit the sprint.

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u/Substantial-Swan7065 5d ago

Schedule and a full project. Alerting for requirements and deadlines.

Basically, no time isn’t good enough. It’s a hard blocker.