Why Can It Be Hard to Release Often?

There are many reasons why releasing often is hard. So many, in fact, that this can be one of the more difficult challenges to tackle. For starters, releasing often is hard because teams can always fill up more time with more work. I have never seen a software product that is “finished,” that is, that there are no ways left to make it better. If a team commits to ship in September, but finishes the critical functionality in June, then the teams I’ve seen tend to use the extra time to do some less critical functionality instead of just shipping the product in June. Furthermore, for enterprise software, releasing a product requires a fair amount of legal, marketing, and sales preparation just to name a few of ...

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