One of my product teams has been successful in deploying to production once every 4 weeks. In the past, our release plan would comprise of an Iterative and incremental development sprint zero, one or three working sprints, one or two alpha or beta sprints, and followed by a hardening sprint.
We were essentially releasing features to end-users once in every six 8 or more. Our product features are critical to the business.
Our product team migrated to a shorter release cycle thereby developing and deploying for each sprint and changed to following into 1 month cycle,
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Benefits of Small Releases
As the iterative development process is mastered, the door opens for the team to deliver smaller and more frequent releases to the end-users, and that is one of the prime drivers of agile. The ability to release software more frequently has two primary business benefits: increased responsiveness to the customer amidst changing marketing conditions and reduced risk to the enterprise.
- Frequent deployments to end-user provide a competitive advantage.
- Product requirements could change significantly if deployed to production once every few months. By launching frequently, you could gather data from end-users earlier and apply adjustments accordingly.
- Keep your team energized and motivated.
- Helps in establishing best practices.
- Exposes risks and challenges with design, architecture, and solutions earlier in the process.
