An Introduction to Agile Practices: Why Small Release in Scrum?

Extreme Programming and Small Releases

This idea that instead of having a big release at the end of a long development cycle, we try to release very often, comes from Extreme Programming. Small releases are essential for your XP as they show you the accuracy of your team towards the project. 

Extreme Programming promotes small releases through continuous integration(CI) and other extreme programming practices. Small Releases helps to deliver a small working increment in a few weeks, so the Development Team can do a weekly review.

Advantages of Small Releases

There are many advantages to small releases into release often. The first one is that we deliver real business value in a very short cycle. And what that means is that we get business value sooner and that intends to increase our customer confidence and make the customer happier. 

Small releases also mean rapid feedback. We release the software soon. We get feedback from the customer soon and we can in this way do exactly what we were saying before, and adapt quickly to possible changes in the requirements. We avoid working for six months on a project and find out six months later that the customer wants something else and we got the wrong requirements. 

In addition, having small releases of products deployed and released soon produces a sense of accomplishment for the developers. It also reduces risks because again, if we're going down the wrong path, we will know right away. If we are late, we will know right away. So these are just additional advantages of having this quick cycle and more releases. 

And finally, as we also said before, we can quickly adapt in case our requirements change our code to the new requirements.

How to do small releases

Before the small release, you should make sure that you are prepared for it and create a release plan. The release planning is used to plan small units that can be released to the customer early in the project. At the release planning meeting, quantify scope, resources, time, and quality. Make sure the iteration is no more than two weeks.

After the release, learn from the past and continuously improve to meet your customer's requirements. 

Reference

1. https://explainagile.com/agile/xp-extremeprogramming/practices/small-releases/
2. http://www.extremeprogramming.org/rules/releaseoften.html

Previously published at https://www.zentao.pm/blog/Why-small-release-in-Scrum-822.html