Release for Learning, Feedback, and Value
These roadmaps show quarterly external releases and monthly internal releases. For many teams starting with agile, a quarterly release might be as fast as they can have anything of value to release. Here’s a question you might find useful to help with thinking and small stories: when do you need to learn about what?
The more often your team can release internally or externally, the more the team learns about what it takes for the team to release. When teams start to use agile approaches, they discover they don’t have enough tests at any level. The team might discover builds take too long or require some manual intervention.
The more often your team practices releasing, the easier releasing becomes. Add to that the idea of releasing into the organization, and the more the team can receive feedback from others across the organization. The more often the team can release externally, the faster the team will receive customer feedback.
We Learned About Releasing the Hard Way
by Stuart, Software Director
Stuart
Before I became a director, I was a project manager. One of the other projects had finished, so I facilitated their retrospective. That project was almost six months late. The company needed the revenue from that release. Now that the product was out, everyone felt relieved. They were happy to think about what they had done.
As part of setting the stage for the retrospective, the VP of engineering said, "Our goal was to release these features by that date. Let’s see why we released, but late." One of the engineers said, "Is that all you wanted? We could have had that six months ago. But releasing is such a pain we didn’t release it."
We learned how to release more often after that retrospective.
Releasing is not just to deliver value to your customers. Releasing creates an environment of feedback for the team about its deliverables. The team can learn if the deliverables meet the customers’ needs for functionality and performance.
The more often your team can release, the more opportunities your team has for feedback. At first, your team might have trouble releasing as often as once every two weeks. Your customers might not be able to take your product even once a quarter now. However, the more often you can release, the better the team will become at releasing and the more likelihood you can get feedback.
The more often you release, the more often everyone learns.
When teams release often, they get feedback. And teams have to release value, not architectural or technical bits of work, to receive that feedback. Let’s explore what value is.
