Continuous Delivery and Agile Principles

 

Continuous Delivery and Agile Principles

our  highest priority is to satisfy customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software is the 1st agile principle. Let us evaluate how important this agile principle is.

What are the benefits of adhering to this principle?

If you want to de-risk as a service delivery team or as a customer to overcome business risks and build upon customer satisfaction, it is important to adhere to this principle as a delivery organization or as a customer.

Continuous delivery of user stories with INVEST characteristics helps both customer and delivery team to be successful.

When there is consistent and focused flow of information and deliverables across the requirement elicitation to software delivery, and then feedback on delivered software from customer back to the team, delivery team and customer are on a mission to meet customer’s business needs in the given environment.

Continuous delivery helps team and customer to understand and bring up any missing requirements, lack of understanding of requirements, mis-communication etc.

Continuous delivery gives customer higher degree of confidence on delivery of complex requirements. Many times requirements will be abstract and nebulous. It is the experience of the delivered software that gives more opportunities for customer to refine the requirements and make it more clear.

Continuous delivery helps both delivery team and the customer to start with minimum requirements and build upon with more complex and more impactful user stories.

What the customer and delivery team could do to create a win-win situation when the timeline for release is fixed , but scope Is varying? In such scenarios, it is advisable for team and customer to have requirements which are must have and which are nice to have. Based on the time in hand, Must have and Nice to have features can be appropriately included in the sprints.

Continuous delivery provides the foundation or enables some of the other agile principles also. When there is continuous delivery of small increments in a potentially shippable form, team will be able to welcome changing requirements because delivery is continuous, team is equipped and used to working with user stories with INVEST characteristics. It helps teams to deliver working software frequently. Team and customer can get a sustainable cadence in terms of requirement management – customer team will be able to spend adequate time to give requirements with the right level of details at right time, also in terms of shippable product increments from service delivery team perspective as the time spent is rightly distributed across project need.

Continuous delivery setup helps to have software delivered frequently. There should be sufficient checks and balances in place to have the optimum flow of requirements, release management and deployment management steps.

Continuous delivery of working software gives a sense of achievement for delivery team by having customer representative’s feedback at every short interval. This helps to increase the team morale.