Release strategies

The golden triangle explains the basic mechanism for releasing early and often. In what follows, it is assumed that the ‘resources’ (people & materials) remain constant and quality must comply to a minimum level.

If either time (deadline) or scope is unachievable, consider to:

• slow down to speed up—teams that finish early accelerate faster, kaizen;
• offload some of the work to external parties;
• scale up human capacity.

Three primary release strategies:

1. Custom-Planned Releases—scope is function of time
   • release date estimated from initial feature set and velocity;
   • snapshot delivery of whatever is ready by the date;
   • scope changes require trade-offs if date remains fixed, consider money for nothing, change for free;
2. Fixed Release Cadence—scope is function of time
   • delivery on a fixed cadence, e.g. monthly or adopting a season beat;
   • snapshot delivery whatever is ready by the date;
   • feature set frozen on latest responsible moment (driven by feature set risk profile)
3. Multi-Team Releases—time is function of scope;
   • epic feature sets split over multiple squads;
   • dependencies tagged visually;
   • regular joint reviews, e.g. scrum of scrums;
   • delivery when a feature set’s components are ready for release.