Agile release strategies
Add to calendarHow long did it take before your last project was able to put a first version into production? How long was the release cycle after that? The basic premise of this tutorial is that any project that is unable to release to production every three months has a problem. The product owner should actively work towards reducing the length of releases. The idea of releasing often is not new. Most agile approaches recommend frequent releases. This tutorial is based on our study of concrete strategies projects use to actually reduce the length of releases and find a Minimal Releaseable Product.
Niklas Bjørnerstedt and Johannes Brodwall have been gathering experiences from a large number of projects on how to release more frequently. We have compiled this information on a wiki at http://wiki.cantara.no/display/ARS/Agile+Release+Strategies+Home. The eventual goal of this work is to publish a book with strategies and patterns for frequent releases.
We want to share our findings with the participants of this tutorial and also gain further ideas for our work with this material.
The tutorial will be a combination of presentations and hands-on exercises.
- Case study of agile release strategies on a sample project (10 minutes)
- Overview of some relevant agile release strategies (15 minutes)
- Practical exercise: Groups will find strategies for a provided sample case study (30 minutes)
- Discussion: Trade-offs between different strategies (15 minutes)
- Discussion: What happens with different strategies when the context changes (15 minutes)
- Everybody get to leave 5 minutes early! Release early!
- Strategies for breaking down large project into manageable releases
- Architectural patterns that will enable frequent releases
- Strategies for dividing the product backlog into releases
- Trade-offs between different approaches for breaking down large projects
- Actual experiences of outcomes for different approaches