#270 – But what if we can’t release often?

With digital solutions there is a ongoing urge to release often. A quest for feature toggles and continuous deliveries of new features and fixes. Automation of tedious tasks do help to drive consistent deliveries and aids in driving high-performing teams. There is good research to support that.

Recently I have worked on a solution, where the system had only to work for a month each year – and be closed down the other months. Some solutions I have similarly looked at, have years between being active. We can’t wait to ship features in the next release – the system has to be at 100% features that specific month.

Examples of business situations and domains:

• Performances, like Eurovision
• Sport events, like the Olympics
• Elections
• Black friday, Christmas shopping?

How do you test when you can only perform the act once – and if it fails it will have serious consequences? You practise and rehearse until it becomes safely repeatable. You have stage-moms and support teams to train with you.

Let’s look at the ultimate example: rock-climbing with no rope. How do you test for climbing up Yosemite’s El Capitan 3000 feet / 900 meters?

Photo by Tobias Aeppli on Pexels.com

The accomplishment is more preparation than performance. Honnold climbed El Capitan roughly 50 times in the decade before his free soloing of the rock formation on July 3, 2017. While he is famous for the ridiculously fast 3-hour, 56-minute ascent, 99% of Honnold’s time on the wall was spent roped up, practicing the route. Knowing where and how to move was the culmination of hundreds of hours on that granite in advance.

The Seven Lessons From ‘Free Solo’ On Working Without A Rope

Besides the scaling of the IT infrastructure for peak load – the test strategy has to consider the fact that the event itself will be a one-off, where there show must go on – and there’s no fallback, only fall forward.

There’s a huge difference between continuously delivering web features every day in a business to consumer setting, as compared to one-off projects of migration legacy platforms. This is why my approach to creating situational aware test plans starts with looking at delivery speed:

Rare	Regular	Often	Pervasive
One-off	Quarterly	Weekly	So often you dont notice

A scale of delivery speed

In one of the projects I looked had we had extensive user rehearsals and dress rehearsals. Well, they are called something more IT fancy. But at the end of the day it was about training to make the performance muscle knowledge in the people performing the event. Much like the training Honnold did.

Lastly, my experience is that you get more organizational traction by aligning with goals rather than risks and issues. It’s a behavioral trick simply to talk about the thing you want to give attention. And at the end of the day the CEO wants to talk about goals rather than risks. She rather wants a successful performance with a few flaws that an delay due to bruised hands (and egos) during waxing on and waxing off.