The Daily Rhythm: Planning, Execution, and Monitoring

1. Planning

For teams delivering code daily, the rhythm of planning, execution and monitoring does not follow the two-week sprint cycle but happens continuously. Here is what this daily rhythm looks like:

• Frequent Prioritization: Daily release teams prioritize their work each day, selecting high impact tasks that can be completed and shipped within a single day.
• Dynamic Backlogs: Instead of working with a static sprint backlog which is derived from the mammoth product backlog, these teams operate with highly flexible backlogs – adding things to it every day. They are ready to pivot quickly in response to customer feedback or issues, urgent needs or new business opportunities.
• Smaller Targeted Tasks: Work items are broken into small, manageable pieces – each designed to be completed within hours. User stories and tasks are refined to be achievable in less than a day, keeping workloads manageable and ensuring that work completed aligns with daily release goals.

2. Execution

Unlike Scrum teams that often release at the end of a sprint, daily release teams execute work with a focus on immediate delivery.

• Incremental Work: Instead of waiting until the end of a sprint, developers push small, frequent changes every day. Every code change is designed to be testable and deployable at the end of the day.
• Automated Testing: It is critical to daily releases. CI pipelines are designed to run tests on each code change, ensuring stability and reliability and readiness of production.
• Seamless Deployment: CD pipelines are in place, so that the code – once tested – is deployed automatically to production. With daily releases, teams cannot afford to spend hours on deployment activity every single day – so it is imperative to automate it.

3. Monitoring

• Automated Monitoring: Monitoring tools track deployment success, system performance, and error rates in real time. Tools like Datadog, New Relic, or Prometheus help track application performance, error rates and system health. These tools are crucial for catching issues early and preventing them from impacting users.
• Daily Retrospective Feedback Loops: Instead of waiting until the end of a sprint, the team reviews their daily progress and identifies immediate improvements – leading to quick adjustments.

Normal Scrum vs Daily Release: Key Differences

While both Scrum and daily release teams follow agile principles, there are notable differences in the processes, timelines and focus areas. Here is a closer look at how the two approaches differ:

Practices to Support Daily Releases

Here are a few practices that help support the goal of daily releases:

• Real Time Code Reviews: Code Reviews are conducted in real-time. Teams use tools like GitHub, GitLab, or BitBucket to review code in small increments, making it easier to spot errors and push fixes promptly.
• Cross-Functional Collaboration: Developers, testers and DevOps professionals work together throughout the day, minimizing dependencies and addressing blockers as they arise.
• Minimally Viable Features: Work is broken down into the smallest possible increments. Rather than delivering a complete feature, teams focus on delivering MVPs that are functional and add value, with enhancements to follow in future releases.
• Emphasis on Automation: It goes without saying that daily releases are nearly impossible to achieve without automation. Automated testing – unit tests, integration tests and end-to-end tests – ensure that the new code does not break existing functionality. Tools like Selenium, Cypress and Jest are useful in this regard.
• CI/CD Pipelines: A robust continuous integration and delivery pipeline is essential to ensure that each code change is tested and ready for deployment within hours – sometimes minutes! Jenkins, GitLab CI/CD, CircleCI, or Travis CI enable automated code integration, testing & deployment.
• Real Time Communication & Collaboration: Teams cannot resort to one catch-up a day like in traditional scrum. They have to be constantly in sync and keep work moving ahead without glitches. Teams often rely on chat tools like Slack, or Microsoft Teams, where real-time discussions and quick problem-solving can occur. Continuous collaboration helps tackle blockers in the moment and keeps everyone aligned.
• Daily Stand-Ups with Action Items: Stand-ups are action-oriented, focusing on quick issue resolution rather than long discussions.
• Continuous Improvement Mindset: While daily release teams may not hold formal sprint retrospectives, they keep a close eye on process improvements. Adjustments to processes, tools or work structures are made whenever necessary.

Key Metrics to Track

Several metrics are needed to ensure that the daily release process remains effective and high-quality. Here are a few examples of such metrics:

• Deployment Frequency: Tracks how often changes are deployed in production.
• Lead Time for Changes: Measures the time it takes from code commit to release.
• Change Failure Rate: Tracks the percentage of changes that lead to incidents or rollback.
• Mean Time to Restore (MTTR): Measures how quickly the team can recover from an issue.

When are Daily Releases Appropriate?

Having explained the processes for daily releases, it is imperative to also discuss that daily releases may not be suitable for every team or product.

Here are some scenarios where a daily release model can be highly effective and beneficial:

Fast-Paced Startups:

For startups or small product teams operating in dynamic environments, daily releases allow rapid iterations based on customer feedback, enabling swift pivots without waiting for lengthy development cycles.

Customer Facing Cloud Applications:

In products where user experience is crucial, like e-commerce or social platforms, daily releases can help deliver new features, bug fixes, and improvements quickly, ensuring a competitive edge.

Products Requiring High Competitiveness:

For applications that need frequent adjustments like marketing analytics, SaaS tools – daily releases allow for agile responses to emerging needs, bugs and requests.

Benefits of Daily Releases

Adopting daily releases comes with significant benefits that can transform software delivery and enhance customer experience. Here are a few key advantages:

• Increased Customer Satisfaction: By releasing updates & fixes daily, teams can respond to user feedback immediately. This responsiveness creates a customer-centric environment, showing users that their needs are heard and met quickly.
• Reduced Risk in Deployments: Smaller, more frequent deployments reduce the risk of introducing major errors. Each change is smaller, more isolated, and therefore easier to monitor, fix or roll back in case of issues.
• Faster Time to Market: Daily releases allow new features, improvements and fixes to reach users almost immediately. This rapid time-to-market ensures teams stay competitive by keeping up with or even outpacing industry trends.
• Enhanced Team Productivity: Daily releases encourage a culture of constant delivery and iterative progress. This model promotes focus and encourages efficiency as teams align around the goal of shipping daily.
• Agility in Adapting to Changes: Teams that release daily become more adept at responding to shifts in user expectations, industry standards or internal priorities, fostering a truly agile mindset.
• Increased Transparency & Continuous Feedback: With daily releases, teams receive real-time feedback enabling quick adjustments. This continuous feedback loop supports agile processes, helping teams remain in sync with user needs.

Conclusion

Daily releases offer agile teams a powerful way to deliver continuous value to customers. By shifting their approach to planning, execution and monitoring, those teams can maintain high quality and speed. Though it requires a high degree of automation, collaboration and flexibility, transitioning to daily releases can bring impressive gains in responsiveness and customer satisfaction.

For organizations ready to embrace this approach, adapting their Scrum practices to support daily releases could be the next step in their agile journey.