Deployment in development phase for Agile projects

Question

I'd like to know the Agile stance on the following situation:

• A contractual, payable milestone states a working version must be installed and run at customer's location;
• Development is still ongoing, not all user stories and issues are addressed;
• A later deployment will be required

My understanding was that the product owner would view the software in its development environment until final QA is done, and then (and not before) would it be deployed into the final production environment.

Answer 1

1. Ask your client to create a test environment that mimes the production one. Do not, under any circumstances, install a new update on the living system, before you test and demonstrate it to the client, because if you screw up your milestone, you also screw up the client's operation;
2. Make your QA team use this test environment;
3. Agile process assumes that you deliver as soon as possible, so don't collect changes in the test environment. Instead, deploy little changes as soon as they are verified by the client. It's much better then deploying the result of the one year work;
4. Backup live data before every upgrade

Answer 2

By Scrum means the Team iterates to produce increments, they are not by default releaseable but they are done. If the customer wishes qa tested stables during the whole process all qamust be done in the iterations before. Scrum teams can do that but its not effient... The product owner you mentioned reflects the customers preferences. Scrum never says anything about what or when to code and test. The Team and the PO decide when todo it in order to serve the customer demands like visible progress. It's good to get immediate feedback. In your case it's sound likes bit of wasting resources...

When you are in test driven project you are may already on the half way to qa due mandatory tests.

I'm afraid to say that there is no The agile way to stop customers having demanding Task to offer...

Answer 3

My opinion is that the Product Owner just needs a way to verify that the chunk of work is done, whether that is in a Test environment or on a development machine. You don't have to actually release an update every iteration. You could spend 3 iterations putting features into QA and then do a release to Production.