Ignite talk at Lean Kanban North America 2013 on responding to the argument that customers won't accept smaller releases

1. “My customers won’t accept smaller releases”
Jason Yip
jcyip@thoughtworks.com
j.c.yip@computer.org
@jchyip
http://jchyip.blogspot.com

2. The real problem is that our consumption
transaction cost is too high.

3. Overall Cost
of Release
Cost of Each
Release
Frequency
of Releases
Reduce this By reducing this
WRONG!

4. Overall Cost
of Release
Cost of Each
Release
Frequency
of Releases
And maintain
or reduce this
Increase
this
By reducing this
RIGHT!

5. Overall
Impact on
Customers
Customer
impact per
release
Frequency
of Releases
Reduce this By reducing this
WRONG!

6. Transaction
costs of a
release
Production
transaction
costs
Consumption
transaction
costs
• Cost of testing
• Cost of deployment
• Cost of management
• Cost of fixes

7. Consumption
transaction
cost
The sum of any costs
borne by consumers of a
product or service to
learn about and/or
accept changes to that
product or service

8. Consumption
transaction
cost
Cost of
defects
Cost of
learning

9. Defects require users to compensate
for expected functionality that no
longer works
Didn’t auto-save
use to work?

10. New or modified UI elements or
functionality impose a learning cost
What’s this
ribbon
thing?!?

11. Consumption costs can lead to
production costs (e.g., training)
Uh, no one seems
to know how to
use our system…
No problem! We’ll just
do more training!

12. Consumption
transaction
cost
Cost of
defects
Cost of
learning
To reduce this
Reduce
this
Reduce
this
AND

13. Standard defect reduction approaches
apply
Exploratory testing
Build pipelines

14. http://www.uie.com/articles/magic_escalator/
(Aka cost of learning)
Reduce this by reducing
the size of the change

15. http://www.uie.com/articles/magic_escalator/
(Aka cost of learning)
Better interaction design
reduces the amount of
knowledge needed to be
acquired

16. http://www.uie.com/articles/magic_escalator/
(Aka cost of learning)
Test the size of this using
user testing

17. To reduce production transaction
costs: smaller batches, build-in-
quality, design for production

18. To reduce consumption transaction
costs: smaller batches, built-in-
quality, design for consumption

19. Your customer won’t accept smaller
releases?
How might you reduce the cost you
impose on them for receiving it?

20. What are the quality of the releases?
How easy is it to learn how to use the
product or service?