Your sprint is over. Your product increment is ready. You could release everything now. But you don’t …

Sometimes, there are reasons not to do a full release. Maybe crucial features aren’t ready yet and it just doesn’t make sense. Maybe stakeholders don’t need it already to be deployed on the production environment.

Not publishing the latest state of development bears several risks, which might be under estimated. For one, transparency decreases quickly when the team’s results aren’t visible. Even though the results where presented in the sprint review, people usually want something to look at after the meeting. If there is nothing people can try out on there own in a quiet minute, the team misses valuable feedback potentially. When this persists over a longer period, stakeholders might start caring not enough and they get used to being barely engaged. Eventually, this then leads to developing in the wrong direction and risking the existence of the team.

Furthermore, the team might also get used to not publishing or deploying the result. Depending on the product’s release strategy and methods of deployment, reaching production state (whatever that is for your product) often is a very valuable exercise. Say the team hasn’t done any production release in the last eight months. 16 product increments where produced, most of them reached the test environment, only a few the near-production test environment and not a single version the production environment. Now, with the 17th sprint finishing, stakeholders are asking for a production release. The team performs all tasks needed but unfortunately overlooks important differences (e.g. configuration) to the test environments. The product is live and errors start piling up. The team reacts quickly but nonetheless stakeholders observed the situation and aren’t particular happy about it. The team’s image just got a scratch.

This situation is of course artificial and a team is not immune to making mistakes. But ignoring the team’s responsibility for the product and everything that is tied to it can become painful.