Las Tres C's De Agil

G00211005

The Three C's of Agile
Published: 17 June 2011

Analyst(s): David Norton, Thomas E. Murphy

Fundamental to success with agile practices is being successful with
continuous integration, but build is just the starting point. Understand key
practices and tools that can reduce risk in projects and enable higherquality software delivery.

Key Findings
■

Continuousintegration, continuous testing and continuous delivery (the three C's) are often not
integrated, reducing the overall effectiveness of agile development.

■

The three C's build on each other, but clients often focus only on continuous integration, as this
is more under the development team's control than continuous testing and continuous delivery.

■

Continuous testing is gaining interest due toeXtreme Programming (XP) test-driven
development, but levels of automation remain low.

Recommendations
■

Establish a project team composed of application development and operations resources to get
the foundation of a release management policy in place.

■

Be prepared to invest in infrastructure to establish integration, testing and release workflow that
spans production,preproduction and development.

■

Define change process and procedures, expanding from operational needs to include
development and project management.

Analysis
Delivery Is Everything, and Nothing If It's Not Right
Continuous integration, continuous testing and continuous delivery are the three C's of agile, a real
example of the whole is more than the sum of its parts. These C's, whencombined, close the loop

between expectation and reality. Without continuous integration, continuous testing and continuous
delivery, there is no agile feedback cycle.
Do not underestimate the value of adopting the three C's. They span multiple roles, development,
testing and operations. They need a mix of collaboration and cooperation supported with agreed-on
policies, defined touchpoints, commontemplates and integrated tooling.
Clients have reported that the three C's are nontrivial, especially on large projects; therefore, allow
time to adopt and embed these practices. The benefits far outweigh the adoption effort. This is a
maturation process as organizations move to enterprise-class agile development (see "EnterpriseClass Agile Development Defined").
Benefits are that the threeC's:
■

Close the loop — This is the most basic and most important benefit. The three C's provide the
user with working software and allow feedback to take place, all in short cycles.

■

Improve project metrics — True state of the backlog is finished: done coding, done testing/
acceptance and done delivering (the three D's).

■

Improve technical metrics — Amount of technical debt isthe real state of the codebase
versus assumed.

■

Provide planning and estimation — A more accurate measure of technical debt allows for
better estimation of refactoring. The combined three C's help remove surprises that often
adversely affect the schedule.

■

Offer immediate feedback — All new or changed code is checked for potential conflicts and
errors of function as soon aspossible after the code is written. The logic is still fresh in a
developer's mind when an error is reported, so that he or she does not have to think about what
he or she was doing on the code days or weeks ago.

■

Build is stable and working — The codebase being ready for release or demo is the norm; it's
implicit in the three C's, and is not something that needs explicit activity. The "allhands on
deck" and panic that is "Activity x.x Build codebase" is stopped.

■

Inspire confidence — Developers become more confident in their ability to deliver support
based on the loop and feedback functionality of the three C's. The business becomes more
confident that it will get the system it wants.

■

Lower technical debt — Defect density, unresolved code conflict, poor...