Friday, December 28, 2012

Release cycle - Part II

      This is additional part to previous post about release cycle.

      So I continued to read +Joel Spolsky and guess what? He actually ended up with Kanban ideas in mind in one of his latest posts. Apparently I should read all Joel's stuff before commenting :)

      Basic idea behind "pull"-kind of scheduling system (as I understand it), is getting features to customer as fast as it possible. Now, saying this - your release cycle should be getting faster and faster. And for this, of cause, you will need all this modern tools (TDD and unit-tests, DVCS and etc), which will allow to push you changes, that are ready for deployment, to production server and know that feature works and has high quality.

      By making "pull" system, you'll illuminate most of "waste" inventory and will be able to show customers same features you use "in-house". Imagine, you have configured you Continues what-ever system (Delivery or Deployment) - system that allows to get code that works through test-system to the production (web service or auto-update server). But this is only part of job for "pull" system.

      You also need to have police to choose features to develop only based on "highest" priority. This means, that if you have a mile long backlog, you will need to sort it by priority (number of clients asking for feature and\or $$ additionally gained) and acknowledge to yourself, that low priority features won't be done... ever. You'll always get new ideas for features from clients or from team - that will go with high priority. So don't spend time to revise them again - throw them out. If any of that features was really important - it will come up again.

     Ok, that's all fun when you have perfect code, it's all separated by modules and it's all covered by unit-tests and etc. But let's look truth in the eyes - code is a mess and tests are inferior. And this means that refactoring is required, while we want to push new features out (customers are waiting and nobody wants to disappoint them).

     To get refactoring going - let's make in a backlog a feature with concreate proposition how to refactor parts of code (not just - "rework this", but concreate "this should have interface A, B, implement algorithm C") and set a high priority to it. Then when current features are done, one by one refactoring tasks will be performed by developers. Proposition for refactoring should have description how new code should be tested (unit-tests, integration-tests, system-tests, performance-tests) to ensure that it works correctly. If new high priority feature gets into play - it will be after some of refactoring tasks, that already got in the queues of developers.

    While code is still imperfect - release cycle will be maintained not continues, but it should be minimized. From years to month as first steps. When new minor version will be released each month - next step go to weeks - just a couple of features (sometimes small and sometimes rather large). While this - refactoring should be going to get code to better shape and unlock possibility to deliver software continuously.

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