Guide for delivering frequently software features that matter (series)

If you’re a software engineer older than 30 years, then you definitely have worked following a non-agile methodology.

Those methodologies are based on a fixed structure, a lot of planning, and hope that everything will go as planned. And they never worked

 

Small bets, less risk

After helping many teams transform their delivery approach over the past 2 decades, I’ve learned that the most successful software projects share one trait: they deliver working software early and often. Think of it like learning to cook—you taste as you go rather than waiting until the entire meal is prepared to discover it needs salt – or to discover that it has too much salt.

Scrum’s power lies in its ability to turn software development from a high-stakes gamble into a series of small, manageable bets.  It basically lowers the risk of creating something that is a failure before it is even released.

Instead of spending months building features that might miss the mark, you deliver value every 2 weeks and course-correct based on real user/stakeholder feedback.

 

The Three Pillars of successful frequent delivery

1. Sprint Planning that actually delivers value

Here’s where most teams go wrong: they focus on completing tasks instead of delivering outcomes.

In my experience, the magic question that transforms Sprint planning is: “What could we deliver to users at the end of this Sprint that would make them say ‘this is useful’?”

Or maybe, if you’re not that far, think in terms of: what do we have to do in order to be able to have something to show to customers/users/stakeholders?

This shift in thinking leads to what I call “vertical slicing”—delivering complete, end-to-end functionality rather than building in horizontal layers.

Think of instead of spending a sprint on “database framework,” you deliver a complete feature like “user login” that touches database, business logic, and user interface.

Or, instead of having a “GUI framework”, implement a GUI element and make it testable. You will still need to put the base of the GUI framework, but you will likely (or hopefully) implement only those elements needed to deliver that one element.

 

2. Your Definition of Done (DoD) is your safety net

The Definition of Done isn’t bureaucracy—it’s your insurance policy against the dreaded “90% complete” syndrome. I’ve seen too many teams rush to demo features that weren’t actually ready for users, creating technical debt that haunts them for months.

A solid Definition of Done includes peer reviews, automated tests, security checks, performance validation, and sometimes stakeholder approval.

Think of it as your quality gateway: nothing passes through unless it meets production standards.

 

3. What enables speed

CI/CD

Continuous Integration isn’t just a nice-to-have—it’s the foundation that makes frequent delivery possible. When code is integrated and tested multiple times, you eliminate the integration nightmares that plague traditional development.

Anything that is manual, especially testing, takes more time on the long run. And in software development you are running a multi stage marathon. Invest in automated End-To-End testing and you invest the time once, not every release cycle.

 

Main branch development

The teams who excel at frequent delivery have embraced “trunk-based development” where everyone works from the main branch. This forces smaller, more frequent commits and prevents the merge conflicts that can derail Sprint goals.

You might say that this is not always possible – and I even agree. Sometimes you need to branch in order to allow parallel development of larger features, which you don’t want to deliver step-by-step. While I don’t like this approach, I understand that sometimes it makes sense.

But, even in such cases, you can apply the same strategy on the parallel branch: make many small commits so that you can release often and test often.

 

I’ll stop here for now, but as you can see, there are many challenges that stop teams from releasing often.

I’ll address this in the next article from this series.

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