Why Wait to Test or Deploy?

As a result of certain management decisions the development of my company's software product has been forced into "maintenance mode".  As there's no further development of the product's features then this has meant the elimination of my development team.

"Maintenance mode" does not mean that absolutely no development work is required to be done and that I'm now sat twiddling my thumbs all day with only one other colleague to keep me company.  For the software product to remain useful to its current set of users (yes, there are still some users) it needs to be actively maintained - fixing bugs, making minor enhancements, etc. This drastic shift has forced me into a very lean way developing, testing and deploying - one which we should probably have been following previously.

I am now the only one doing any of the maintenance development work, while my sole remaining colleague handles the testing and support activities. With nobody else doing any other development, there is nobody else's code to wait for.  So the question naturally arises:

Why wait for another piece of development from me before testing and deploying?

The only reason I could think of for holding back on testing and/or deploying a piece of code was to do with the overhead of testing and/or deploying that piece of code.

If testing is related to just a single bug fix or feature enhancement then the scope of testing is limited, which reduces the overhead.  If a few related bugs can be fixed in the maintenance development then they can all be tested at the same time, further reducing testing overhead.

It was felt that deployment might be a significant overhead for the IT support doing the deployment, but checking with IT support revealed that there was no significant overhead, though there is scope for further automation.

The other deployment activities involve build creation (mostly automated, but there is scope for further automation), release notes generation (working from a template and mostly copying changeset comments) and demonstration/feedback meetings with users.  If the release is just bug fixes or minor behaviour enhancements then we don't see the need to have a demonstration/feedback meeting to show people that an error no longer occurs or that a selection is automatically population in response to a click elsewhere.  Demonstration/feedback meetings with users can wait until there is something of a more tangible difference to demonstrate.

So, we're down to the development, testing and deployment of a single feature at a time (plus a handful of related bug fixes and enhancements that are undertaken in the course of the feature development through the normal refactoring and fix-it-when-you-find-it approach).

The result: faster deployment, almost continuous deployment.

As each release now consists of a single feature another question naturally arises:

Why keep a backlog of other feature requests?

Each demonstration/feedback meeting with users finishes with asking them to vote for the feature which will be of most value to them.  Not the top 5 features, but just the single feature that will give them the most value.  With only one feature being worked on at any time there is no point in maintaining a list of any other features.  At each demonstration/feedback meeting new ideas may be discovered for something that will give the most value to the users, so keeping a record of the second most valuable feature request from some point in history is just administrative overhead.

So, there is now no backlog.

The result: no backlog maintenance is required.

If we had more staff why couldn't we continue doing the same?  Couldn't we have worked like this when there was a development team?  As each feature became ready, couldn't we have deployed it?

Big Backlogs: are they worth it?

Previously I'd written how I'd reorganised a 500+ line spreadsheet of backlog items.  The backlog had, if anything, grown rather than shrunk.  The question then naturally arises:

What is the point of maintaining the backlog if most of it is never used?

There is a sense that discussions around backlog items would be wasted if those items were not recorded and prioritised in some backlog.

Different potential customers had presented many features that they'd required, and all of those were recorded.  Though customers and potential users carried on without those items as the sales were not secured.

(Maybe a better sales approach was required: get agreement on purchase of the core product then provide incremental delivery?)

A similar question can be raised regarding large bug lists:

What is the point of maintaining a backlog of hundreds of bugs?

If users can continue quite happily using the product then what is the point of maintaining a backlog of hundreds of bugs, particularly bugs which go back years?

This also raised the question:

Why is there such a large list of bugs in the first place?

If the first iteration of a product is poor there will be many bugs reported.
If the first iteration of a product is also large there will be many more places to find more bugs.
If the bugs are not addressed in the next iteration but more features are added then they will remain.
If development continues with the same level of quality then more bugs will be produced for the new features.
Result: even more bugs.

So, how to stop having and ever-increasing number of bugs?

You can stop the flood of bugs by:

1. starting with a small set of features in the first iteration, so there are fewer places for bugs to lurk
2. building quality in from the start, by not attracting bugs in the first place
3. continuing in future iterations with few features and high quality

But what about a big backlog?

If you start off with a small set of features aren't people still going to ask for many more features?
Yes, but you still have to prioritise which ones you're going to do in the next iteration.

Should the features not implemented in the next iteration continue to be recorded?
If after iteration #1 feature X is requested, but it's not implemented in iteration #2, it may no longer be relevant when it comes to iteration #3, other feature requests may be made as a result of viewing and interacting with the product produced in iteration #2.

Therefore, features that are not implemented should be aged and eventually dropped from the backlog, thus keeping it small.

Backlog (Lack of) Management

To be honest I've been very negligent in not properly managing our product's backlog.  I'd been able to get away with it because I'd not been under much scrutiny, I'd been able to manage it mostly from my head and an e-mailshot, and I'd had other things to do that had been more important (or at least I claimed they were more important and I had to be the one to do them).

Our product's backlog is enormous.  Over 500 lines in a spreadsheet.  Trying to prioritise that and ensure that there is no duplication was going to be a futile task.  So, I decided to adopt a principle from kanban and "start with what I have".  Given the reference to kanban it should not be so surprising to learn that what I had to start with included a kanban board which indicated exactly what was being worked on at what stage and what was to be worked on next.

The first step was to synchronise the kanban board and the backlog.  This may seem like duplication - because it is - but it allows anyone looking at the backlog to see the current context and how it fits into the rest of the backlog without looking at two different media (a board and a spreadsheet).  Anyone can now look at the backlog spreadsheet and see what's been delivered recently, what's being implemented, what's a prototype, and what's to be done next.

The next step was to look at the 400+ other backlog lines.  These had been gathered over the years from various sources - developers and salespeople's whims, prospective customers' whims, customer complaints, etc.  Fortunately we'd recorded the source for each of these requests.  Unfortunately the person writing down or transcribing the requests had not always done a good job of ensuring that the request was understandable to other readers.  Trying to prioritise all of these individual requests would be pointless, but I could at least group them into related areas.

Grouping the backlog of requests then allowed me to get a picture of what had been requested in different areas, irrespective of who had requested it and when.  I could now identify duplicate entries and remove them.  I could also identify related requests and combine them.  The lack of grouping previously had also made the categorisaton of requests rather haphazard, further contributing to the difficulty of managing the requests.  A series of painstaking reviews have now imposed some consistency on the categorisation.  The result is that the reader can now find information more easily, which is a fundamental (yet often overlooked) requirement of any document.

Anyone working on a particular area can now see if there was a minor requests in that area or a refactoring suggestions in that area of the product and choose to incorporate that minor request or refactoring into their current feature development.

I've still to bring the backlog fully up to date, but now it is at least manageable.