Rapid Agile – Real-time Actionable Prioritized Individual Delivery

So what does come after Scrum/Kanban/Agile?

The evolution of the SDLC continues as expected and if you look at the trend, the focus has been to get things done quicker – Rapid.

Andy @ Assembla calls it Scalable Agile and has great content explaining the concept behind it; I call it Rapid – Real-time Actionable Prioritized Individual Delivery, or Rapid Agile and the basics around the process are very similar. The focus or goal is to prioritize individual efforts rather than a team sprint, act upon real-time feedback and  deploy much quicker; often deploying new features and bug fixes several times a day rather than ever other week or so.

Case Study: Blank Label

At Blank Label when we were much younger, we manually deployed whenever we wanted as we were trying to rapidly enhance and stabilize our offering. With every feature came a lot of bugs and it was usually the changes in usability that brought inconsistency in usability as we had limited resources and a lot of “to-do’s”. Eventually we settled on a 2 week delivery cycle  but as we were attempting to find out who our customer was, we made some drastic changes only to see orders drop from several a day to almost none every week. We had no idea what of the 20 things we changed in the 2 weeks that killed it as A/B testing had told us that our sales would go up, not vanish.

Fast-forward many months – we saw that we had gone back to our old habits, but this time we had process and we were not disrupting things when we updated, we deployed to a staging server, tested things out there and then released to the live server. This still required manual builds and deployments, many times fixes just didn’t make it to the live system when issues were discovered because it required someone to build and upload…

Now fast-forward to yesterday – we now build the backlog in Jira and make use of green-hopper for their kanban board. We go through a to-do, doing, build and live workflow, where bamboo will automate code checkins and deploy with AWS ec2 to our staging server; once testing passes staging, the deployment to live is a simple click of a button and live is then refreshed.

For test, we have gone from  1-3 pushes to test per day to 5-8 pushes per day and for live will be going from one refresh per day to 2-3 refreshes. We still have a small team of developers, once this team grows we will probably see a large increase in pushes to test, but will probably maintain the 2-3 refreshes to live per day (depending on the functionality).

In the not so distant future, I will provide the development workflow process along with the tutorial to build all the Atlassian stuff that will get you to a rapid continuous integration, deployment and deliver model as I did not see a lot of solutions that focused on the .Net MVC3/4 Razor stack.