Product Demos – Not Just for the Customer Anymore? (Part 1)

One of the basic Agile tenets that most people agree on – whether or not you’re an Agile enthusiast or supporter – is the value of early and continuous customer feedback. This early and often feedback is invaluable in helping software development projects quickly adapt to unexpected changes in customer demands and priorities, while concurrently minimizing risk and reducing ‘waste’ over the lifetime of a project.

Sprint Demo
In the Agile world, we traditionally view this customer feedback in the form of a formal product demonstration (i.e. sprint demo) which would occur during the closeout of a Sprint/Iteration. In short, the “team” – those building the software – presents features and functionality they’ve built in the current sprint to the “customer” – those who will be users or sellers of the product. Even though issues may be uncovered and discussed – usually resulting in action items for the following sprint – the ideal end result is both the team and the customer leaving the demo session (and in theory, closing the sprint) with a significant level of confidence in the current state and progress of the project. Sprint demos are subsequently repeated as an established norm over the project’s duration.

This simple, yet valuable Agile concept of working product demos can be expanded and applied effectively to other areas of software development projects:

• Why not take advantage of the proven benefits of product demos and actually apply them internally – within the actual development team – before the customer is even involved?
• Let’s also incorporate product demos more often – why wait two weeks (or sometimes even a month, depending on sprint duration)? We can add value to a software development project daily, if needed, without even involving the customer.

Expand the Benefit of Demos
One of the common practices where I have seen first-hand the effectiveness of product demos involves daily deployment of code into a testing or “QA” environment. Here’s the scenario:

• Testing uncovers five (5) “non-complex” defects (i.e. defects which were easily identified in testing – usually GUI-type defects including typos, navigation or flow issues, table alignments, etc.) which are submitted into a bug-tracking tool. Depending on the bug-tracking tool employed by the team, this process is sometimes quite tedious.
• Defects 1-5 are addressed by the development team and declared fixed (or “ready to test”) and these fixes are included in the latest deployment into a QA environment for retesting.
• Defects 1-5 are retested. Defects #1 and #2 are confirmed fixed and closed.
• But there is a problem – it’s discovered EARLY in retesting that Defects #3 and #4 are not actually fixed and additionally, the “fixes” have now resulted in two additional defects – #6 and #7. For purposes of explanation, these two additional defects were also easily identified early in the retesting process.
• At this point, Defects 3-4 need to be resubmitted, with new Defects – #6 and #7 – also added to the tracking tool.

Where are we at this point? In summary, all of this time and effort has essentially resulted in closing out one net defect, and we’ve essentially lost a day’s worth of work. Not to mention, developers are wasting time fixing and re-fixing bugs (and in many cases, becoming increasingly frustrated) and not contributing to the team’s true velocity. Simultaneously, testers are wasting time retesting and tracking easily identifiable defects, therefore increasing risk by minimizing the time they have to test more complex code and scenarios.

So there is our conundrum. In a nutshell, we’re wasting time and team members are unhappy. Check back for a follow-up post next week, which will provide a simple yet effective solution to this unfortunately all-too-common issue in many of today’s software development practices.