Skip to main content

Why Releasing More Frequently is Good For You

So I was thinking a bit about frequent releases. There are many agile books and articles that explain how more frequent releases are a good thing. However, to many people in management, this is counter-intuitive. They say "Slow means safe. Slowing down means more time to improve quality, more time to test, and more time to fix bugs. Also slow is cheaper, because it's less overhead costs." I've seen a lot of projects where release frequency slows down, especially after the initial development burst and launch of a product, and I think this is a shame.

So how do I go about explaining people that the slow-means-safe line of thought is wrong?

I've come up with a little model I'd like to go through here.

I start off with defining a Rate of Development, which we'll assume is constant throughout the model (leaving out factors as motivation and skill).

Now, having a high rate of development is not worth anything if we're not Doing the Right Thing. This symbolizes working in the right direction, and our Performance ultimately is decided by Doing the Right Thing at our Rate of Development. Performance represents the long term success of our organization.

So so far we've got RoD x DtRT => Performance





Now we won't pick at the RoD in this model (assumed to be constant), but rather look at DtRT: Doing the Right Thing encompasses all the hundred little decisions we make every day, from whether or not we should rename this method, which OS we choose on our servers, to which feature we choose to develop. So what tells us what is the right thing to do? Answer: Feedback.

Feedback => DtRT


Feedback comes from customer (support, sales, social media), developers (retrospectives, standups), monitoring metrics and logs on the product, doing user experience testing, market response and stuff like that. This feedback gives us the intelligence we need to Do the Right Thing.

How can we increase Feedback? Answer: With more Frequent Releases. This is fairly intuitive, releasing more frequently will increase the mass of Feedback in most channels.

Frequent Releases => Feedback


At this point traditional management will cross their arms and say hold on, it's not that easy: We can't risk releasing more often, it's too dangerous. So, let us consider Safety as a parameter for that.

Safety => Frequent Releases


Safety means no nasty bugs or deployment botches. The problem with management is that they mix up what is the cause of the effect here. They see Frequent Releases as a driver for Safety going down, while in reality it is on the other side the factors lie.

So let's dig a bit deeper and see what leads to Safety. Here are the typical factors:

  • Tests (automated tests, unit-, integration-, as well as manual testing where necessary)
  • Good Code (fewer unexpected side-effects from making changes)
  • Small Feature Set
The first two there are fairly obvious. The last one is a pill management has a hard time swallowing: 

Releasing a Smaller Feature Set means more safety, because there are fewer features to figure out, develop, and to test in parallel. Fewer moving parts that can malfunction, so to speak.

Now the model is complete. Have a look at the complete thing:



(You can also draw a line from Doing the Right Thing leading back up to the factors increasing Safety.) 

Typical objections from management that object to this model (exercise for the reader: are these fallacies or not?):
  • Doing the Right Thing is better decided by planning/strategy/architecture, than by Feedback.
  • Safety increases linearly with QA: 10 times as many features is just as well tested by 10 times the QA.
  • Good Code is irrelevant to Safety. (Refactoring is actually regarded as a minus to safety in some places).
While Frequent Releases are the result of Safety and the drivers behind it, traditional management unfortunately sees it as a lever they can turn down to increase safety. 

So, I'm not sure if the model will be of any help to you. For me it's just a nice way to explain the benefits of frequent releases to non-developers. 
Labels:

Comments

  1. Patrick Cornelissen4/10/11 15:12

    Also releasing frequently minimizes the stress of deployment, because to be able to release (and deploy) often, you need good automation and a clean process, which is well understood by doing it on a regular basis instead of once a quarter or worse.

    ReplyDelete
  2. tfnico4/10/11 23:23

    @Patrick: Thanks for the comment! Good point. There could be another bubble above Safety called Process or Routines that apply to the stability of doing releases. Releasing frequently feeds directly back there, like you say.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Anonymous14/11/11 18:57

    Great thoughts. Somewhat reminds me to the influence diagrams found at the end of Kent Beck's good old TDD book.
    It looked something like more frequent tests -> more _confidence_ -> productivity.

    This looks the same, more fundamental principle ('test' generalised as 'feedback'). Apart from the link mentioned above (frequent releases forces you to automate things better, which in turn is a positive feedback loop on both frequent releases and performance directly), it seems to help eliminate the other hindrance against itself. That is, I found a common reason for not making a release is lack of confidence in stability/code maturity - which this loop helps with: frequent feedback -> confidence -> performance.

    ReplyDelete
  4. tfnico14/11/11 20:31

    @Gin: Thanks for commenting! My thoughts are very influenced by Beck, so that figures :)

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Open source CMS evaluations

I have now seen three more or less serious open source CMS reviews. First guy to hit the field was Matt Raible ( 1 2 3 4 ), ending up with Drupal , Joomla , Magnolia , OpenCms and MeshCMS being runner-ups. Then there is OpenAdvantage that tries out a handful ( Drupal , Exponent CMS , Lenya , Mambo , and Silva ), including Plone which they use for their own site (funny/annoying that the entire site has no RSS-feeds, nor is it possible to comment on the articles), following Matt's approach by exluding many CMS that seem not to fit the criteria. It is somewhat strange that OpenAdvantage cuts away Magnolia because it "Requires J2EE server; difficult to install and configure; more of a framework than CMS", and proceed to include Apache Lenya in the full evaluation. Magnolia does not require a J2EE server. It runs on Tomcat just like Lenya does (maybe it's an idea to bundle Magnolia with Jetty to make it seem more lightweight). I'm still sure that OpenAdvant...
6 comments
Read more

Git tools for keeping patches on top of moving upstreams

At work, we maintain patches for some pretty large open source repositories that regularly release new versions, forcing us to update our patches to match. So far, we've been using basic Git operations to transplant our modifications from one major version of the upstream to the next. Every time we make such a transplant, we simply squash together the modifications we made in the previous version, and land it as one big commit into the next version. Those who are used to very stringent keeping of Git history may wrinkle their nose at this, but it is a pragmatic choice. Maintaining modifications on top of the rapidly changing upstream is a lot of work, and so far we haven't had the opportunity to figure out a more clever way to do it. Nor have we really suffered any consequences of not having an easy to read history of our modifications - it's a relatively small amount of patches, after all. With a recent boost in team size, we may have that opportunity. Also the need for be...
1 comment
Read more

The Git Users Mailing List

A year ago or so, I came across the Git-user mailing list (aka. "Git for human beings"). Over the year, I grew a little addicted to helping people out with their Git problems. When the new git-scm.com webpage launched , and the link to the mailing list had disappeared, I was quick to ask them to add it again . I think this mailing list fills an important hole in the Git community between: The Git developer mailing list git@vger.kernel.org  - which I find to be a bit too hard-core and scary for Git newbies. Besides, the Majordomo mailing list system is pretty archaic, and I personally can't stand browsing or searching in the Gmane archives. The IRC channel #git on Freenode, which is a bit out-of-reach for people who never experienced the glory days of IRC. Furthermore, when the channel is busy, it's a big pain to follow any discussion. StackOverflow questions tagged git , these come pretty close, but it's a bit hard to keep an overview of what questio...
Post a Comment
Read more

Git-SVN Mirror without the annoying update-ref

This post is part of  a series on Git and Subversion . To see all the related posts, screencasts and other resources, please  click here .  So no sooner than I had done my git-svn presentation at JavaZone , I got word of a slightly different Git-SVN mirror setup that makes it a bit easier to work with: In short, my old recipe includes an annoying git update-ref step to keep the git-svn remote reference up to date with the central bare git repo. This new recipe avoids this, so we can simply use git svn dcommit   directly. So, longer version, with the details. My original recipe is laid out in five steps: Clone a fresh Git repo from Subversion. This will be our  fetching repo. Set up a  bare repo. Configure pushing from the fetching repo to bare repo In the shoes of a developer, clone the repo Set up an SVN remote in the developer's repo In the new approach, we redefine those last two steps: (See the original post for how to do the fir...
17 comments
Read more

Git Stash Blooper (Could not restore untracked files from stash)

The other day I accidentally did a git stash -a , which means it stashes *everything*, including ignored output files (target, build, classes, etc). Ooooops.. What I meant to do was git stash -u , meaning stash modifications plus untracked new files. Anyhows, I ended up with a big fat stash I couldn't get back out. Each time I tried, I got something like this: .../target/temp/dozer.jar already exists, no checkout .../target/temp/core.jar already exists, no checkout .../target/temp/joda-time.jar already exists, no checkout .../target/foo.war already exists, no checkout Could not restore untracked files from stash No matter how I tried checking out different revisions (like the one where I actually made the stash), or using --force, I got the same error. Now these were one of those "keep cool for a second, there's a git way to fix this"situation. I figured: A stash is basically a commit. If we look at my recent commits using   git log --graph --...
12 comments
Read more