Being Agile: Eleven Breakthrough Techniques to Keep You from “Waterfalling Backward”

Value-Driven Development: the Outworking of Frequent Code Drops

I mentioned earlier that shipping alphas is another way to support releasing often. Releasing often may be difficult for enterprise software products because significant functionality may take some time to develop. However, releasing often is important so that you get timely feedback on the value of the functionality currently in progress. Another way to achieve this goal is to provide frequent code drops to your customers to receive timely feedback. The old-fashioned notion of a beta was a “feature complete, test complete” snapshot of the code for customers to try. The problem with this mechanism is that customer feedback usually came too late to make any big changes in the product ...