Your customers can’t take your product more often than once or twice a year. Because the product doesn’t need to leave the building, the teams don’t release internally. Nor do the teams demo on a regular basis. The teams miss the feedback loops so critical for an agile approach. Their agile transformation falls apart. Rethink Your Definition […]
In Part 1, I talked about small stories/chunks of work, checking in all the time so you could build often and see progress. That assumes you know what done means. Project “done” means release criteria. Here are some stories about how I started using release criteria. Back in the 70s, I worked in a small development group.
Would you like to release your product at any time? I like it when releases are a business decision, not a result of blood, sweat, and tears. It’s possible, and it might not be easy for you. Here are some stories that showed you how I did it, long ago and more recently. Story 1: Many years
If you saw Large Program? Release More Often, you might have noted that I said, You want to release all the time inside your building. You need the feedback, to watch the product grow. Some of my clients have said, “But my customers don’t want the software that often.” That might be true. You may
I’m working on the release planning chapter for Agile and Lean Program Management: Collaborating Across the Organization. There are many ways to plan releases. But the key? Release often. How often? I suggest once a month. Yes, have a real, honest-to-goodness release once a month. I bet that for some of you, this is counter-intuitive.
We got here because I started with Managing the Stream of Features in an Agile Program. That got me to Organizing an Agile Program, Part 1:Introduction, Organizing an Agile Program, Part 2: Networks for Managing Agile Programs, Organizing an Agile Program Part 3: Large Programs Demand Servant Leadership. Sorry I got behind. Life interfered. Some
If you have an agile project larger than two or three feature teams, you have an agile program. A program is a collection of projects where the objective is one business deliverable. If you’ve managed programs before, you know how difficult it is to keep programs on track. With bigness comes more risk. One of
One of the challenges in a program is how you manage the checkins, especially if you have continuous integration. I am quite fond of continuous integration, no matter how large your program is. I also like short iterations. (Remember Short is Beautiful?) But imagine a product where you have a platform and layers. I’m separating
One of my program management clients is organizing a program and is having trouble thinking about a delivery model that fits their program. They are transitioning to agile and are accustomed to traditional releases. When I suggested they have someone representing deployment on their core team, that was an initial shock to their system, and
Once you have a program (a collection of interrelated projects focused on one business goal) and you have technical debt, you have a much bigger problem. Not just because the technical debt is likely bigger. Not just because you have more people. But because you also geographically distributed teams, and those teams are almost always