my customer won't accept smaller releases

“My customers won’t accept smaller releases”

Jason Yipjcyip@thoughtworks.com

j.c.yip@computer.org@jchyip

http://jchyip.blogspot.com

The real problem is that our consumption transaction cost is too high.

Overall Cost of Release

Cost of Each Release

Frequency of Releases

Reduce this By reducing this

WRONG!

Overall Cost of Release

Cost of Each Release

Frequency of Releases

And maintain or reduce this

Increase this By reducing this

RIGHT!

Overall Impact on Customers

Customer impact per release

Frequency of Releases

Reduce this By reducing this

WRONG!

Transaction costs of a release

Production transaction costs

Consumption transaction costs

• Cost of testing• Cost of deployment• Cost of management• Cost of fixes

Consumption transaction cost

The sum of any costs borne by consumers of a product or service to learn about and/or accept changes to that product or service

Consumption transaction cost

Cost of defects

Cost of learning

Defects require users to compensate for expected functionality that no longer works

Didn’t auto-save use to work?

New or modified UI elements or functionality impose a learning cost

What’s this ribbon thing?!?

Consumption costs can lead to production costs (e.g., training)

Uh, no one seems to know how to use our system…

No problem! We’ll just do more training!

Consumption transaction cost

Cost of defects

Cost of learning

To reduce this Reduce this

Reduce this

AND

Standard defect reduction approaches apply

Test Driven DevelopmentPair Programming

Continuous Integration

Automated testing

Exploratory testing

Code reviews

Static analysis

Build pipelines

Automated environment management

Test data management

Mutation testing

http://www.uie.com/articles/magic_escalator/

(Aka cost of learning)

Reduce this by reducing the size of the change

http://www.uie.com/articles/magic_escalator/

(Aka cost of learning)

Better interaction design reduces the amount of knowledge needed to be acquired

http://www.uie.com/articles/magic_escalator/

(Aka cost of learning)

Test the size of this using user testing

To reduce production transaction costs: smaller batches, build-in-quality, design for production

To reduce consumption transaction costs: smaller batches, built-in-quality, design for consumption

Your customer won’t accept smaller releases?

How might you reduce the cost you impose on them for receiving it?

What are the quality of the releases?

How easy is it to learn how to use the product or service?