Wednesday, April 04, 2007 4:08 AM
by
elandes
Experiences from the Agile Front, Finalizing the first release
On the AgileProjectManagement mailing list on yahoo, someone asked a question about the end of releases for agile projects. I took this question as one asking how do we communicate to the customer that we are completed with this release. At my current employer we do a Customer Acceptance test with our stakeholders. The following explains in more detail how we did our final Customer Acceptance Tests.
Our project consisted of approximately 10 iterations worth of user stories (we started with one week iterations and eneded with two week iterations). For each story, we had customers write automated acceptance tests using fitnesse, and we coded against this. Now that we are ready to release, we had a face to face Customer Acceptance test with our stakeholders and others who would use the system. We held this mainly to test the UI, and give system exposure to the customers who were not stakeholders. I really like doing this, and have heard of other teams who do these tests once a month.
But now that we have finished our Customer Acceptance Tests, we take what we've learned from that (maily UI stuff), and apply any fixes, and release. Then we go into Release n mode. Not sure how others are doing it, but we feel confident in doing it this way.