How do you plan releases? What development methodology does your company follow?

Barracuda has a structured approach that blends continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) with Agile methodologies, using specific release timelines. This setup can offer several advantages, especially in managing complex software development and deployment processes effectively. Here’s a breakdown of how this approach might typically work and how it can be optimized: Agile Practices: We organize our development activities into sprints, each lasting about 2 weeks. These sprints include regular ...Read More

Release planning requires 5 things: Define the goals of the project. What outcomes are you hoping to achieve? Clearly articulate your success metrics Understand your customer needs. Conduct qualitative (surveys, interviews, etc) as well as quantitative (funnel analysis, engagement metrics, etc) research to better understand what you should build. Prioritize your roadmap. Create a roadmap and use a prioritization framework (RICE, Kano) to create your roadmap. Next break down the large scale visio ...Read More

Releases can be separate from when the product is made available to customers. Some times, people think of product launches and software releases as needing to be tied together, but in order to maintain agile development and ensure market readinesss, it makes sense to time releases for when your customers will be ready to consume those resources. Typically, I think of planning product launches in these ways: Customer market readiness - when does the customer need this feature for their workflow? ...Read More

Our Releases includes what we have as new feature development, existing customers requests, bugs and performance /tech debts. Given this, we try to do a 6 week release cycle with bug features or customer facing changes and multiple hotfixes which cater to fast deployment to address bugs and other customer requests. We use Sprints to manage these cycles. We have a Annual plan broken to multi quarter plans which are further broken to Sprint planning that happens once in 2 weeks. This allows for an ...Read More

Key steps to plan external releases and to make them successful: align on cadence, release themes and map features and outcomes to releases.  Align on cadence:  Start by understanding external requirements specific to your product category. Consider industry events, conferences, or seasonal needs (e.g., travel or shopping seasons). Determine the number of releases based on your company’s needs. For instance, Airbnb follows a summer and winter release schedule (two releases per year), while other ...Read More