What does the 3rd Agile Principle (Frequent Delivery) look like in Action?

Many want to go Agile or claim to be Agile. The question is, are you and will you align with the Agile values and principles? In this article, I expand on the third principle to better understand what it means and attempt to identify what evidence looks like to determine if a culture change may be occurring. What is this principle?  

Deliver working software frequently, from a couple of weeks to a couple of months, with a preference to the shorter timescale is the third Agile principle. This principle promotes the ability that when customers believe there is value in what is built, it can be immediately delivered. Identifying the elusive customer value means you can release it when the customer wants it. If it is delivered too early, the customer may not be ready for it; if it is too late, the market opportunity is missed. 

Agile thinking includes a fluid world, where changes are continuous welcome, and teams have the capability of releasing frequently. This ability to frequently release, highlights the importance of having processes and infrastructure to help with continuous integration, build, and test. This ability assumes a level of automation that needs to be in place. Automated testing increases the possibility of testing the functionality as is reasonable, including the capability of performing non-functional testing such as performance testing, load testing, and more. 

What actions exhibit frequent delivery?  

• An established and positive relationship with customers
• Iterative framework with Sprint Reviews to incorporate feedback quickly 
• A release capability to incrementally and rapidly deploy software 
• Continuous integration supported by a merging process and configuration management system 
• A continuous build process supported by an automated build management system 
• Test automation infrastructure that can support continuous testing  

It is up to you to determine what supporting evidence will highlight that continuous integration, build, test, and frequent delivery is occurring. It is worth experimenting with this as it will help you better understand and embrace the Agile principles. The ultimate question, do you really believe in the principle that focuses on frequent delivery?

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To learn more about what the Agile Principles look like in Action, consider reading:

• 1st Agile Principle (Satisfying Customer with Valuable Software) at: https://cmforagile.blogspot.com/2023/09/many-want-to-go-agile-or-claim-to-be.html
• 2nd Agile Principle (Welcome Change to Requirements) at: https://cmforagile.blogspot.com/2024/01/do-you-have-evidence-to-support-2nd.html

Four Anti-Patterns impacting Customer Value

Value is in the eye of the beholder.  Smart people will say that the beholder is the customer. While in most companies there will be a similar saying to the “customer is king”, some have lost their way and have somehow forgotten the importance of customer and their feedback.  The result is organizational anti-patterns that impede successfully getting to customer value. There are a number of anti-patterns on why this occurs and below are four: 

• Known as Pretend Certainty anti-pattern, this is believing that you can pretend to know with certainty what the customer wants upfront.  The danger: the consequence of limiting options and being blind to customer feedback to shape product direction.  
• Known as No Room at the Innovation Inn anti-pattern, this is focusing primarily on driving efficiencies through cost cutting and high resource utilization.  The danger: the unintended consequence of a lesser focus on the customer with little room to innovate and adapt. 
• Known as Sub-Optimizing for Comfort anti-pattern, this is sub-optimizing for the comfort of having a well-established plan and set of well-defined processes.  The danger: the consequence of restricting change at the expense of adapting to customer needs.  
• Known as The Few and the Missing anti-pattern, this is engaging few to represent the whole.  The danger: the consequence of understanding customer pool, ignoring potential customers, and missing customer feedback to shape product direction. 

When you are a start up, you realize the importance of being customer value driven because if customers don’t buy the product, then your start-up goes under. Because of this and their small size, most start-ups will stay very close to the customer or potential customer.  When companies become larger, there is a greater chance these anti-patterns appear.  More process and more controls are often put into place and unfortunately this leads to restricting change.  A company may sub-optimize for their own processes and plans that distances them from their customers.  

The question is, do you see any of these anti-patterns within your organization that impact your ability to achieve customer value?  Avoid the poor “aim of the anti-pattern’.  Instead, engage with your customers and use their feedback to help you hit the customer value target!

For more information on the topic of Customer Value, consider reading the following articles:

• Dangers of Certainty in Realizing Customer Value
• How an Agile Customer Feedback Vision can lead to Customer Value

Story Telling with Story Mapping

Once upon a time, a customer had a great buying experience on a website.  The customer loved how from the moment the customer was on the site to the moment they checked out a product, the process was intuitive and easy to use.   The process and design of the customer experience was not by accident.  In fact, it was done very methodically using story mapping. 

What is Story Mapping

Story Mapping is both a visual practice that provides you with an understanding of how a user might use a feature and a decomposition practice that helps you consider how you may incrementally decompose an idea. Established by Jeff Patton, the visual portion helps the team understand the customer experience by imagining what the customer process might be.  This promotes the team to think through elements of what the customer finds as valuable. 

The decomposition portion allows the team to think through a number of options which represent pieces of work (e.g. epics and user stories) on how to incrementally build the feature to gain the most feedback from the customer.  This helps both validate the value of the idea and ensures the idea is being built in a way that provides the best customer experience. 

Benefits of Story Mapping

Story Mapping is a way to bridge the gap between an idea and the incremental work ahead.  It's a great way to decompose an idea to a number of unique user stories.  What are some additional benefits of story mapping?

• It moves away from thinking of functionality first and toward the customer experience first. 
• It provides the big picture and end-to-end view of the work ahead
• It's a decomposition tool from idea to multiple user stories. 
• It asks the team to identify the highest value work from a customer perspective and where you may want the most customer feedback.
• It advocates cutting only one increment of work at a time instead realizing that feedback from the current increment will help shape subsequent increments. 

Getting started with Story Mapping

How might you get started in establishing a story map?  It starts by having wall space available to place the customer experience upon.  Next you educate the team on the story mapping process (see below).  Its best to keep to a Scrum team size (e.g., 7 +/-2), where everyone participates in the process.  Then as a team, follow these high-level steps:

• Create the “backbone” of the story map.  These are the big tasks that the users engage with. Capture the end-to-end customer experience.  Start by asking “what do users do?”  You may use a quiet brainstorming approach to get a number of thoughts on the wall quickly
• Then start adding steps that happen within each backbone.  
• From there explore activities or options within each step.  Ask, what are the specific things a customer would do here?  Are there alternative things they could do?  These activities may be epics and even user stories. 
• Create the “walking skeleton”.  This is where you slice a set of activities or options that can give you the minimum end-to end value of customer experience.  Only cut enough work that can be completed within one to three sprints that represents customer value. 

As you view the wall, the horizontal access defines the flow of which you place the backbone and steps.  The vertical access under each contains the activities or options represented by epics and user stories for that particular area. Use short verb/noun phrases to capture the backbones, steps, and activities (e.g. capture my address, view my order status, receive invoice). 

Next time your work appears to represent a customer experience, consider the story mapping tool as a way to embrace the customer perspective.  Story mapping provides a valuable tool for the team to understand the big picture, while decomposing the experience to more bite size work that allows for optionality for cutting an increment of work.  Its another tool in your requirements decomposition toolkit.