Estimating Considered Wasteful: Introducing Micro-Releases
Groups that are releasing their software to production one or more times per week are doing micro-releases.
Industrial Logic has been doing micro-releases of its Greatest Hits eLearning product (http://industriallogic.com/elearning) for a few years now.
Micro-releasing has simplified our process by eliminating traditional agile planning activities, such as
- estimating user stories
- reconciling estimates
- calculating velocity
- trying to obtain a consistent velocity
Instead, our focus remains on the mini-release. What important user story or stories do we most need to ship to production in the next few days?
In this talk, I’ll describe
- What led up to these changes
- Our context — people, amount (and kind of) test automation, etc.
- The nitty-gritty details of this approach — using real examples from our project
- Benefits we are seeing from this approach
- What needs improvement
- When Micro-Releasing does or does not make for a good fit
- How Micro-Releases relates to Chartering and larger-scale Release Planning
This talk would be broken into 50-minutes of lecture, including a look at our plans, release data, etc. There would be 40 minutes of Q+A, as I anticipate many questions.
This is a new talk. I’d rehearse it at a few Bay Area locations before giving it at Agile2008.