It’s important to focus on delivering value quickly rather than starting something early.
The last thing customers and managers expect is that it’s common for software building teams to unintentionally create artificial delays. Yet teams do this all the time by trying to build every feature at once.
Half‑done or half‑tested features pile up and prevent deployment.
Instead it’s better to prioritize the most important features first and finish them end‑to‑end. Deliver vertical slices and only call it “done” when an the code, the tests, and the docs are finalized. And consider using feature toggles when you must decouple rollout from completion.
We ship value more reliably when we focus on “finishing”, instead of “starting”.
Discussions for the team
- Who decides the order of features to ship and why?
- Do our stories need to include more details about the criteria to make sure it’s deployable?
- Is there some commonality with the type of stories that are only half‑done and sometimes block our releases?
- What additional disciplines can we adopt to finish features fully?