How to Choose an Agile Release Cadence

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One of the things that a delivery team needs to do, often in collaboration with product management, is choose the release cadence of their product. This is an important aspect of, you guessed it, release planning.  Your release cadence defines how often you release your solution both internally and externally into production (or the marketplace). The issue is how to determine how often the product should be released into production. In this blog we explore:

1. Where are you deploying to?
2. What affects release cadence?
3. What release cadence choices do you have?
4. What do we recommend?

Where Are You Deploying?

There are several target environments that you might choose to deploy to. These environments include:

1. Demo environment(s). Many teams maintain a demo environment for their solution so that their stakeholders can see what has been developed to date at their leisure. Demo environments support transparency with your stakeholders, reduce the number of “one-off” requests by stakeholders for demos (because they can simply see the solution for themselves), and of course they provide a stable environment in which your teams can run demos.
2. Testing environment(s). Many teams have their own testing environments, or they work with independent test teams with their own testing environments, or both. You should strive to test as often and early as possible, an implication being that want to deploy into your test environment(s) as often as you possibly can.
3. Production/marketplace. Some teams will release their solutions into their production environments (or to someone else’s cloud) where end users will use the systems. In the case of commercial software companies they will release their solutions into the marketplace where they are then sold to customers. Throughout this blog whenever we use the term production we also mean the marketplace.

For the sake of terminology, deploying into demo or testing environments are often referred to as internal releases and into production as an external release.

What Affects Release Cadence?

There are several factors that affect the choice of release cadence:

1. Stakeholder needs. How often do your stakeholders, and in particular your end users, want your solution to be released? This can be a difficult issue because very often your stakeholders might not be able to perceive what is appropriate for them. We’ve seen stakeholders ask for quarterly releases, be delighted when then get monthly releases, and then start asking for weekly releases once they realize the potential of modern agile strategies.
2. Stakeholder capability to accept change. We like to think that more often is better, and in the vast majority of situations it is. As difficult to believe as this may seem, at the far extreme we’ve also seen some systems where the natural release cadence is once every three or four years because that’s the rate at which stakeholders are able to accept change. In this case the product was a transaction processing (TP) system infrastructure product, but we’ve heard similar stories about major database management systems (DBMSs) products too. Granted, a release cadence this long is very rare but it does happen in a small number of situations. Far more common is the mistaken belief by IT professionals that their stakeholders are unwilling or unable to accept shorter release cycles. We’ve seen numerous organizations where the IT people tell us that their stakeholders can’t handle anything more regular than a quarterly or bi-annual release, yet these same stakeholders regularly use commercial software that is updated several times a week.
3. Your organizational culture. Some organizations, particularly those with an existing traditional release management team, often have release cultures that lean towards larger and less frequent releases. These organizations often have significant investments in legacy systems and insufficient investments in automated regression tests/checks. As a result releasing solutions into production tend to be seen as a risky endeavour. At the other extreme we’ve seen companies with more of a continuous delivery mindset that have a “release as swiftly and often as you can” culture. These organizations have typically invested heavily in code quality, automated regression testing, and automated deployment thus making deployment a simple and virtually risk-free effort.
4. The team’s ability to deliver. Of course a primary determinant of your release cadence will be how often you’re able to actually produce a potentially consumable solution. This is affected by the skills of your team members, your ability to collaborate, your ability to vertically slice functionality into small features, and your delivery infrastructure.
5. Your delivery infrastructure. How easy it is to release a potentially consumable solution into production is determined in part by your technical environment. This includes the extent of your automated regression tests, your automated deployment scripts, and your capability to monitor production. In general, the greater the level of automation the more often you can release.
6. Your solution architecture. Is your solution architected to be released incrementally? Is it possible to enable/disable functionality at a granular level (perhaps via feature toggles or a similar technique)?
7. The cost/risk to release.   Cost and risk tend to go hand-in-hand when it comes to releasing solutions into production. This is because the more manual your release/deployment processes the more expensive they become and the more likely there are to be problems somewhere in the process. Conversely, the more you automate the overall deployment effort the cheaper it is to deploy and the less risky it becomes as you’re more likely to run into, and then automate a solution to, deployment problems. The less expensive and less risky it is to release your solution the more viable it becomes to release more often.
8. Release cadence of other teams. Like it or not your team is likely dependent on the work of other teams. For example you may need web services being built by another team, and you can’t fully release your solution until those web services are available in production.  We’ve written detailed articles about how to manage dependencies between agile/lean and traditional teams, dependencies between agile teams, and dependencies between agile and lean teams.

Release Cadence Choices

Table 1 lists many common release cadences, from more than annual to several times a day. It also lists the potential tradeoffs of each approach and indicates when you may want to adopt each one.

Table 1. Comparing external release cadence options.

Our Recommendations

When it comes to releasing your solution, we have several recommendations for you to consider:

1. Automate, automate, automate. The more you have automated, the lower the cost of deployment and the lower the risk. This enables you to release more often with confidence.
2. Release internally very often. This is your opportunity to get good at releasing your solution, at squeezing out the cost and the risk.
3. Release externally as often as possible. The faster and more often you can release into production the more competitive your organization will be.
4. Always look for ways to release more often. Impressed with your ability to release once a month? Aim for bi-weekly. You’ve now releasing bi-weekly? What’s stopping you from releasing weekly? Weekly releases? Meh! Release daily! Your team is releasing daily grandpa? How about automatically releasing many times a day every time you have a working build?

Further Reading

• The Release Management Process blade describes the issues surrounding releases in a multi-team enterprise environment.