Successful Incremental Releases
3-4 hours
One of the benefits of Agile Software Development is "early and continuous delivery of valuable software." Dividing development work up into small pieces (user stories or backlog items) then building the most valuable parts first sounds like a simple idea, but there's often a bit more to it. Sometimes it takes a few not-so-valuable parts to allow users to take advantage of the most valuable parts. At times the most valuable parts may show well, but without a sufficient amount of software implemented, users may be unwilling to set aside legacy software or even manual processes to actually put the new software into use and earn the return on investment incremental release should bring.
In this tutorial participants will learn the basics of planning incremental releases that are useful to their users. We'll discuss strategies for splitting user stories into the small but useful parts that allow releases to contain more user stories. You'll learn more about the "myth of the finished user story" and why, if you're not cautious, your stories may inflate while you're not looking.
OOPSLA 2006
- Incremental Releases Users and Stakeholders Will Love (zipped pps)
- Handouts (pdf)
- Handout Suppliment (pdf)
Other Useful Information
- How You Slice It, the original Better Software article describing the span planning technique
- Word Doc containing the task cards used in the modeling exercise
- Gerard Meszaros' Storyotypes paper which served as foundation and inspiration for the thinning guidelines discussed in this tutorial
