Deliver Shippable Products With Good Engineering Practices

Unal Patel

September 26, 2022

Good engineering practices can help an agile team deliver shippable products. This leads to the highest probability of introducing new issues to the product. In addition, this practice does not provide any safety nets. YOLO shipping is justified in some circumstances, including early-stage startups with few customers, mid-sized companies with poor engineering practices, or in the case of an urgent incident at a place without incident handling practices.

YOLO shipping is the highest likelihood of introducing new issues into production

YOLO shipping is the quickest way to ship changes to production, but it also has the highest likelihood of introducing new issues into the production process. Therefore, this type of shipping is generally not recommended because it lacks safety nets. However, it is sometimes justified in certain circumstances, such as early-stage startups that do not have customers or with poor engineering practices.

Anti-patterns prevent teams from delivering a potentially releasable product at the end of a sprint.

Fortunately, many practices can help agile teams deliver shippable products. These practices are proven effective, but they aren’t always widely implemented. For example, one of the most common anti-patterns is the practice of creating long-lived feature branches. Unfortunately, this can lead to a team leaving its code base rotting in a slightly different context instead of delivering a potentially releasable product.

To avoid this problem, it is vital to avoid specific anti-patterns in your teams. Unfortunately, some of these behaviors may be unintentionally harmful to the process or even to your company’s growth. The good news is that no member of your team is immune to anti-patterns, and the Product Owner or Scrum Master is responsible for addressing them as part of the process.

Good engineering practices help agile teams deliver shippable products.

Often, the best way to help an agile team deliver shippable products is to implement good engineering practices. Retrospectives, for example, are a great way to enforce new practices. Then, development teams can use these practices to improve the quality of their work.

Unfortunately, these practices are often less well-known than they should be. These practices can help an agile team produce shippable products by ensuring that teams can experiment and fail quickly. Developing prototypes is crucial to agile engineering because it helps validate assumptions and collect data. Traditional processes may take months to complete a project, but agile teams can create a shippable product within the first week.