How often do you demonstrate your development builds to your customers during development of a release?  Unfortunately if you are like most agile teams that I encounter the answer is not very often, if ever.  If you are practicing agile software development you know about the importance of working in short increments.  But do you really extract all the value you can from your iteration?  Let me elaborate with a real life example I encountered recently.

As I said in a previous post, I had the pleasure of attending a presentation by Ron Jeffries at the St. Louis XP User's group meeting back in January.  Another portion of his talk that really hit me was on the subject of "done equals done."

"Done equals done" is another way to reference the XP practice that an iteration should result in releasable bits. Of all the items Ron talked about, this is the one topic that I have always felt challenged by.

Ron Jeffries presented at the St. Louis XP User's group meeting back in January. As he put it, the topic of the presentation was anything that came to his mind at the moment. He simply stood at the front of a crowded room and talked while drawing on an overhead projector.

I won't try to transcribe the entire meeting, but there was one statement that has stuck with me that I wanted to share.

"Smaller Releases Help Management"

Ron spent a lot of time on this subject. When he first said it I though "of course that is obvious". As he continued, he brought out finer points that I hadn't considered as much.