Why every software team should get into the habit of daily releases

Previous posts on the importance of continuous delivery show how adopting daily releases helped Klipfolio’s agile software development team improve both the product and its processes.

The importance of continuous development and daily releases came into sharp focus after reading The Power of Habit. After making daily software releases a standard practice, a cascade of positive outcomes followed for the team.

Klipfolio had, in effect, created what Duhigg calls a “keystone habit.”

This post advocates for daily releases and continuous delivery by showing how building the habit delivered benefits.

What is a keystone habit?

Duhigg is a New York Times business reporter. His book starts by looking at the science of habits, why they exist, and how they can be changed.

He argues that the key to success in anything from losing weight to creating an exceptional company is understanding how habits work. By detailing the experience of successful individuals, sports teams, and corporations, he shows how implementing “keystone habits” can, as the book’s website puts it, “earn billions and mean the difference between failure and success, life and death.”

The book is a useful read for anyone interested in using habits to drive change.

Duhigg’s notion of keystone habits really stands out.

According to Duhigg, these are the habits that underlie daily behaviour and influence other habits and the way people work and play.

A strong routine matters. For a personal take on habits that can transform daily life, this Business Insider article summarizes several keystone habits anyone can use.

From a business perspective, the idea of keystone habits gets interesting.

In this Huffington Post blog, Duhigg writes about how in 1987 Paul O’Neill, the CEO of the Aluminum Company of America (Alcoa), turned the company around and created an impressive trickle-down effect of improved habits by focusing on one thing: making the company safer.

Duhigg writes that “O’Neill’s success at Alcoa is just one example of a keystone habit, a pattern that has the power to start a chain reaction, changing other habits as it moves through an organization. Keystone habits, I found in writing my book, can influence how people work, eat, play, live, spend, and communicate.”

That message is powerful.

At Klipfolio, adopting continuous delivery to production and daily releases created a similar chain reaction.

The keystone habit: daily releases and continuous delivery to production

Looking back at earlier practices, the keystone habit was the move to daily releases and continuous delivery to production.

Once that change happened, it sparked a series of improvements that transformed Klipfolio’s agile software development team for the better.

In retrospect, it seems logical. Daily releases only work if the team follows a number of best practices in the development cycle and the continuous deployment pipeline. For daily releases to work, other habits had to change.

The habits created and the ones retired

• Share the burden for daily releases among several people
  The team used to rely on a single designated person to do releases, which limited the ability to act and learn. Now at least two people per scrum team can do the daily releases. The role rotates every sprint. Each person takes notes on what can be improved in the release process. Over time, this has produced steady improvements. Because everyone shares the daily releases burden now, everyone looks for opportunities to make it better.
• Document the process better
  The release process used to be a mix of manual steps and scripts and was not well documented. Both automation and documentation improved. Most of the process is automated, and the parts that are still manual are now well documented.
• Create a culture of testing
  Writing automated tests was not part of the culture. That changed. The team moved from not requiring or wanting to write unit tests to advocating for above 90 percent unit test code coverage in new projects. This shift created quality-driven development habits like code reviews, automated testing, continuous integration, and more.
• Automate wherever possible
  Tooling and processes, including building environment infrastructure, are automated with code. For example, where there used to be a single shared test environment that had to be provisioned manually, there are now more test environments than developers on the team, and all are built with code.
• Release in small increments as soon as possible
  Holding back large features until they were “ready” created risk. Continuous, incremental delivery of small shippable increments brings clear benefits, including better breakdown of features, improved user stories, ongoing user validation, and frequent use of feature switches (read more here).

This shift affected not just the development organization. It encouraged the broader business to think differently and get comfortable with small increments and feedback-driven product development.

While not all of the habits above are must-haves on the path toward daily releases, once that journey starts, teams seek improvements in release quality and begin tracking relevant agile metrics. Along the way, the other habits described above start to feel inevitable.

Daily releases are the keystone habit of high-performing software development teams. Making it a habit pays off. It also keeps Klipfolio Klips dashboard and reporting software fresh, reliable, and ready for your team’s next dashboard.

See also:

• Continuous delivery: What it is, why it works - and why you need it
• How to ensure quality in continuous delivery
• Key metrics for agile development teams
• A software development manifesto
• How do dashboards help agile software development teams?