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Question

    Delivering features across multiple iterations
    Question posted 12/4/07 by Catherine Connor , tagged Challenges
    3651 Views, 2 Comments
    Title:
    Delivering features across multiple iterations
    Question:

    1.     For a feature that will take 3 months to develop, what would you do. Build it over 3 iterations?

    Comments

    • posted 12/4/07 by Catherine Connor
      The first thing you do is determine your team cadence (collaborative decision) - will you do 1 week iterations or 3 week iterations? if you don't know, start with one week. The idea is to get into a rhythm that you will repeat, and experience has shown that starting with short iterations is best. Once you have your cadence defined, you split the feature into a set of stories that can be implemented within one iteration. Stories should show some value to customers - even minimum value as "login in". Stories are then estimated in detail and scheduled into iterations, in priority order defined by the product owner. Priority order should reflect customer value, but you may also have to consider story dependencies - maybe one story must be built first (such as "login in") for other stories to work. And you keep doing iterations until the "feature" has enough value to release to customers. At the end of each iteration, you check with customers whether you are on the right track, and you adapt the stories for your next iteration accordingly.

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    • posted 3/2/09 by Tom Grant

      The funny thing is, delivering the complete feature across multiple releases is not unique to Agile. Agile has introduced, through stories and other techniques, the discipline about feature completeness that many development teams needed. Because of the longer Waterfall cycles, new priorities often crowd out the projects needed to complete features. (Does this sound as though I've experienced this frustration?)

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