Consider When You Can Release to Customers
Sometimes new-to-agile product owners wonder about releasing something that’s minimum. My opinion: when in doubt, release. Don’t release nonsense. Make sure the story is an entire story, an MVP or an MVE, but release as early as possible. You will see several benefits:
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The more often you release, the more the team practices releasing safely. The team will build tests so it doesn’t break anything.
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The earlier the team releases, the faster it’s likely to receive feedback.
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The team has less WIP in the form of partially complete feature sets.
Let’s assume the team has a feature set of 16 stories. Even if each of those stories only took one day to complete, you might want to release the completed stories into the code base. But the feature set isn’t complete. Is it safe to release?
Here’s the value in keeping the main code line current with all the features that are done. You don’t have to manage branches in the code base or have to worry about regressions. On the other hand, what if the customers can’t use the feature yet? Or what if these stories break some other part of the code because the whole thing isn’t complete?
Many organizations use some sort of flag that prevents the customers from using only partially completed feature sets. If your organization does that, watch out for an increase in this potential waste: the number of items waiting to be unflagged and exposed to the customers. You’ll see the cycle time for that feature set increase.
Consider flags for enabling features. Consider the ability to roll back any changes, including database changes. Do release as early as possible for feedback.
Back in the Potential for Release Frequency graphichere, I suggested you locate your product on a continuum ranging from a totally digital product where the cost to release is quite low to a product with hardware where the cost to release is quite high. As a leader, can you move your product down toward the lower-cost-to-release part of the continuum? What would you have to do to the product to make that happen?