Being Agile: Eleven Breakthrough Techniques to Keep You from “Waterfalling Backward”

Chapter 8. Release Often

Being agile requires releasing software often so that teams learn fast and customers succeed sooner.

By Leslie Ekas

Unfortunately, for many enterprise software products, upgrades can take hours, days, or even weeks; they can be labor-intensive and often error-prone. The harder it is to update software, the more likely it is that customers will delay upgrading and insist on one-off enhancements and fixes as a stopgap. This is the worst possible scenario for customers because these one-offs are likely to experience the lowest amount of testing. They are also detrimental to product development organizations because these one-offs leave numerous customers each with their own particular version of the product, which is costly ...