Product Ownership in a Continuous Delivery / Deployment environment


#1

Just curious to hear others experiences when it comes to Product Ownership in a CI/CD environment.

For instance, how have you handled User Acceptance Testing in this environment as well as Product Owner acceptance as “done”


#2

Hi Troy. Happy to share a perspective from my world as a PO. Our teams ship completed stories on demand, which is normally ~12x a day across our 18 teams. Our process includes:

  • Running all tests (unit, integration, end to end) each time code is committed (10-30 minutes)
  • Providing the ability to run on demand tests (10-30 minutes)
  • Providing the ability to spin up on demand test environments (5 minutes)
  • Running all tests (unit, integration, end to end) and deploying when merged to master (20-30 minutes)
  • Using feature toggles to allow continuous deployment while releasing on demand (a few users, more users, more users, all users)

Within these things, we handle validating our hypothesis / value (aka accepting) through some of the following:

  • Automated tests help to ensure high quickly and quick feedback to the team
  • Pairing helps to bring multiple perspectives
  • Using on demand testing environments for demos, quick user feedback, creating docs, accepting, etc
  • Using feature toggles to beta test changes with small groups of users to decide to 1) iterate more or 2) release for all users

As a PO, I love CD b/c it provides more feedback cycles to validate hypothesis and make sure we’re actually providing value to our users.

5 years ago, we shipped every 2 weeks. Contrast that with ~12x a day. That’s 2x feedback cycles per month vs. 240 per month now. Therefore, while accepting is important, we also have a lot more opportunities to learn, pivot, and find the actual value.


#3

@zoltron3000 thanks for sharing this story it’s just validated the discussion I have been having for the last 2 weeks!


#4

I fully agree with zoltron3000. As a PO I love CI/CD as well because it allows a very quick feedback cycle.


#5

Understanding the value of a pipeline as a product owner was a challenge for me to grasp the first time it was explained to me. The aha moment for me was when work such as ADA requirements, metadata, and other less user-facing pieces of a product came online. The team showed me that adding those checks to the pipeline give stakeholders the confidence that we are checking all the boxes as we build and won’t have as many “gotchas” before we ship an increment of a product.

Also gives stakeholders and product managers the ability to showcase and accept work on demand as opposed to the larger and more formal exercise. They see value sooner and can help me pivot to the most valuable work next.