There are reasons why developers fear rapid releases, but also strong arguments about why it makes your business so much better.
You run a business. Your customers have needs and you are solving those needs and pains. Your business success depends on how well and how quickly you do it. If you are slow, you lose customers to your competitors. If you solve the wrong thing, you lose customer engagement. That is very simplified, of course, but it is true and that’s why if your business is including a digital product, you definitely need minimal time-to-market. Sounds easy? Good. Let's dig deeper.
In our #superagile culture, we build processes so that each line of code written by developers will reach the production environment as soon as possible. We release many times a day. Facebook for example releases thousands of times a day (that is why they are Facebook - so successful). It helps businesses to grow. For one thing, you simply lose time if you release seldom. But even more important is the fact that you lose time to learn about your end-users which makes the loss grow exponentially.
Facebook’s vice president of growth has said: “If you’re pushing code once every two weeks and your competitor is pushing code every week, just after two months that competitor will have done 10 times as many tests as you. The competitor will have learned 10 times, an order of magnitude more about their product.”
If it is all so simple and logical, then why don't all development teams use continuous deployment (a technical term which means a strategy for software releases wherein any code commit that passes the automated testing phase is automatically released into the production environment, making changes that are visible to the software's users)? Because developers fear it. And yes, in our Concise offices we have had challenges implementing it as well. That’s why last year we made a survey to understand the fears behind it and the top 5 fears that came from those answers are as follows:
And yes, rapid releasing improves software quality.
It's time to end excuses, improve your processes, be brave and take care of your business’ success. Need help? We are glad to spread #superagile around the world! Say hi and let's discuss business growth!