Managing Startups: Best Blog Posts

Chapter 37. Continuous Discovery

Marty Cagan

I have written recently about how product teams do product discovery in parallel with product delivery. I have also written about how teams sometimes like to time-box their product discovery work.

What I’d like to write about in this article is an increasing trend I am seeing towards both continuous delivery and continuous discovery.

Continuous Delivery is an increasingly popular notion today. The concept has been talked about by many teams for a few years now, but now there are actually quite a few teams really doing it.

Nearly all product teams today do continuous build. The principle here is that if there are build problems, it is really good to find them sooner rather than later, so typically builds are initiated the moment changes are committed.

Many product teams have taken this principle to the next step and have learned that integration problems are time consuming, and that by integrating early and often (rather than a “phase” before testing), they can significantly speed up their overall throughput by minimizing the time that they are working in isolation.

Similarly, instead of testing everything in a phase at the end of a release cycle (even a 2-week release cycle) and finding all the problems at once, it is much better to run automated regression test suites continuously to find newly introduced issues as soon as possible (which significantly reduces the possible sources of the issue and hence the time to correct). ...