Full Delivery Life Cycles

Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD), the solution delivery portion of the Disciplined Agile^® (DA^™) framework, supports several full delivery life cycles. It does this because solution delivery teams face different situations, so one life cycle will not fit all. This article explores the concept of what a full delivery life cycle means, overviews each of the life cycles supported by DA, overviews the waterfall/serial life cycle (which is not explicitly supported by DA), and how to choose and evolve between the life cycles.

Table of Contents

This article is organized into the following sections:

1. The 30,000 ft. View
2. Phases? Really?
3. The DAD Life Cycles
4. Why Support Several Life Cycles?
5. The Downside of Supporting Several Life Cycles
6. Get Life Cycle Posters

The 30,000 ft. View

One of the key aspects of Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD) is that it promotes a full, beginning-to-end, solution delivery life cycle. Figure 1 below overviews a high-level view of a project-based delivery life cycle. It is a three-phase life cycle, more on this in a minute, where you incrementally build a consumable solution over time. We start with this high-level view so that we can explore several important concepts before diving into details.

Granted, as you see in Figure 2 which depicts more of a system life cycle there is more to the agile SDLC than just those phases. First, there are pre-project aspects to portfolio management where potential projects or products are identified, priortized, and sufficiently funded to start an Inception phase effort. Furthermore, business and technical roadmaps may be available to guide the team’s efforts. After Transition a solution is operated and supported in production (or the marketplace in the case of commercial products). Eventually, potentially after decades of use, a solution is retired (taken out of operation). If we were to look at things from the point of view of IT, there are also cross-product/project concerns at the enterprise level such as enterprise architecture, portfolio management, reuse engineering, and more that the DA tool kit now supports. Figure 2 also indicates how the Construction, Transition, and Production phases are what is typically considered the purview of Disciplined DevOps.

Phases? Really?

First, the DAD delivery life cycle explicitly calls out three phases for agile project teams:

1. Inception. Team initiation activities occur during this phase. Although “phase” tends to be a swear word within the agile community, the reality is that the vast majority of teams do some up front work at the beginning of a project. While some people will mistakenly refer to this effort as Sprint/Iteration 0 it is easy to observe that on average this effort takes longer than a single iteration (the 2013 Agile Project Initiation survey found the average agile team spends about a month in Inception whereas the most common iteration/sprint length is two weeks). So in DAD’s Inception phase we do some very lightweight visioning activities to properly frame the project. It takes discipline to keep Inception short.

2. Construction. During this phase a delivery team will produce a potentially consumable solution on an incremental basis. They may do so via a set of iterations (Sprints in Scrum parlance) or do so via a lean, continuous flow approach (different versions of the life cycle are discussed later). The team applies a hybrid of practices from Scrum, XP, Agile Modeling, Agile Data, and other methods to deliver the solution.

3. Transition. The DA recognizes that for sophisticated enterprise agile projects deploying the solution to the stakeholders is often not a trivial exercise. Delivery teams, as well as the enterprise overall, will streamline their deployment processes so that over time this phase become shorters and ideally disappears from adopting continuous deployment strategies. It takes discipline to evolve Transition from a phase to an activity.

The DAD Life Cycles

The DA tool kit does not prescribe a single life cycle, unlike other agile methods such as Scrum. Every team is in a unique situation, therefore the DA tool kit supports several life cycles to choose from.

In this section we present overviews of each DAD life cycle, each of which links to a more detailed article. The DAD life cycles are:

• The Agile Life Cycle: A Scrum-based Project Life Cycle
• The Lean Life Cycle: A Kanban-based Project Life Cycle
• The Continuous Delivery:Agile Life Cycle
• The Continuous Delivery:Lean Life Cycle
• The Exploratory (Lean Startup) Life Cycle
• The Program Life Cycle for a Team of Teams

The Agile Life Cycle: A Scrum-based Project Life Cycle

Figure 3 presents a detailed view of DAD’s Agile life cycle which extends Scrum’s construction life cycle. We call this the basic/agile life cycle because it’s likely where you’re going to start. Common scenarios for adopting this version of the life cycle include situations where you’re extending Scrum to be sufficient for your needs or you’re transitioning from RUP to a disciplined agile approach.

In addition to this being a more detailed view of the life cycle, there are several interesting aspects to this life cycle:

• It’s iteration based
• It uses non-Scrum terminology
• It shows inputs from outside the delivery life cycle
• There is a work item list, not a product backlog
• It includes explicit milestones

The Lean Life Cycle: A Kanban-based Project Life Cycle

Figure 4 depicts what we call the Lean life cycle. This life cycle promotes lean principles such as minimizing work in process, maximizing flow, a continuous stream of work (instead of fixed iterations), and reducing bottlenecks. New work is pulled from the work item pool when the team has capacity. While Scrum prescribes the use of a set of “ceremonies”, such as the daily co-ordination meeting (Scrum), iteration (sprint) planning sessions, retrospectives to be done on certain cadences within the iterations (sprints), Lean does not prescribe this overhead and instead suggests that it be done if and when necessary. This requires a degree of discipline and self-awareness not usually found on teams new to agile, hence this life cycle is considered advanced. While the concepts of Lean and the Kanban system it uses are very easy to learn, it can be difficult to master the principles of lean flow and maximizing the throughput of the system.

There are several interesting features to this life cycle:

1. It supports a continuous flow of development

2. Practices are on their own cadences

3. It has a work item pool

The Continuous Delivery: Agile DAD Life Cycle

The Continuous Delivery: Agile life cycle is depicted in Figure 5. This life cycle is a natural progression from the Agile life cycle. Teams typically evolve to this life cycle from the Agile life cycle, often adopting iteration lengths of one-week or less. The key difference between this and the Agile life cycle is that the continuous delivery life cycle results in a release of new functionality at the end of each iteration rather than after a set of iterations. Teams require a mature set of practices around continuous integration and continuous deployment and other Disciplined DevOps strategies.

The Continuous Delivery: Lean DAD Life Cycle

Figure 6 depicts DAD’s Continuous Delivery: Lean life cycle. It is basically a leaner version of the previous life cycle where the product is shipped into production or the marketplace on a very regular basis. This could be often as daily, although weekly or monthly is quite common too. As with the agile version of the continuous delivery life cycle, teams require a mature set of practices around continuous integration and continuous deployment and other Disciplined DevOps strategies.

The Exploratory (Lean Startup) Life Cycle

Figure 7 depicts DAD’s Exploratory life cycle. This life cycle is followed by agile or lean teams that find themselves in startup or research situations where their stakeholders have an idea for a new product but they do yet understand what is actually needed by their user base. As a result they need to quickly explore what the market wants via a series of quick learning experiments. In effect this life cycle can be a replacement for the Inception phase of other DAD life cycles to validate the vision or used continuously throughout the life cycle.

A Program Life Cycle for a Team of Teams

Figure 8 depicts DAD’s Program life cycle. DAD’s Program life cycle describes how to organize a team of teams. Large agile teams are rare in practice, but they do happen. This is exactly the situation that scaling frameworks such as SAFe, LeSS, and Nexus address.