If you are asking for the need to integrate at every integration point & at the end of a Sprint/Iteration, Yes, it's definitely needed. Frequent integration helps in giving a whole system to the customers. Integration is a learning cycle to get feedback from the stakeholders & customers. Incremental delivery mandates integrating the increments at every stage. Saving Changes...
Joshua RenderProduct Owner| CognizantHarrisville, Ny, United States
You should definitely work to integrate each increment into the whole product. This may be handed off to a different team or could be part of each iteration done before the review. You don't have to release each increment, you can integrate it into a test environment, but it should be integrated and tested for full functionality to make sure you didn't break anything. Saving Changes...
RAJESH K LProject Manager, PMP| Bharat Electronics, Bengaluru, IndiaBengaluru, Karnataka, India
Thanks Girija & Joshua for reply. My pertinent point if we work on integration every iteration, it consumes significant amount of time and the team velocity will reduce over a period of time. Saving Changes...
Joshua RenderProduct Owner| CognizantHarrisville, Ny, United States
Even if it wasn't agile, the parts should be integrated into the whole very frequently. That is just a best practice, in fact daily is best, Agile or not. If its software it shouldn't consume that much time if it is set up for best practices. If it is not set up for best practices, It may consume some time for each team members code to be integrated, but Agile increments aren't the problem there. Saving Changes...
Yes, I agree with Joshua. Either its Agile or Traditional methodology, frequent integration is needed to get the whole working system.
Rajesh,
To reduce integration time, DevOps comes handy. Its for automated integration & deployment. You might have to run automated tests too so as to test your integrated systems. Saving Changes...
To echo Girija, the best way to reduce transition (I prefer the DAD terminology for stages of delivery) is shifting testing as left as possible, and embracing true CI/CD with NO branching and effective use of feature toggles...
Kiron Saving Changes...
RAJESH K LProject Manager, PMP| Bharat Electronics, Bengaluru, IndiaBengaluru, Karnataka, India
Joshua/Girija/Kiron, Thanks for your valuable inputs/comments Saving Changes...
