Vertical Slicing of an Epic or Feature
One of the most important parameter for to track success of agile implementation is “Time to Market”.
When rubber hits the road, that translates to how fast can you deploy your new feature from concept to a working code in production.
With age old approach of “Big bang” Releases, there is no way to go to market fast. Not to mention big bang releases are too risky for any organization to continue doing it in such a competitive landscape.
As a solution product teams should be coached to slice their features vertically. Find ways to launch to production parts of the feature independently such that those smaller pieces of functionality still add value to customers. Which means that it should also be fully functioning piece of working software – from screens to database.
If you consider the SAFe hierarchy (Epics – Features – Stories) then this would mean you are slicing your epics into features which will be deployed to production one after another.
If you are slicing a really big feature, from technical perspective, below is what your slices will look like.
How do we coach teams to slice the feature:
there could be multiple approaches to consider when you are vertically slicing your functionality
1) Slicing by functionality
Breakdown your large functionality into small logical pieces of functionality that will independently add value to customer.
Example – If you are a digital application doing online sales, start with basic feature of showing the product and ability for customer to purchase the product.
Your can keep adding additional features like search, recommended products, wish-list etc. in your next launches.
2) Slicing by product categories
Example – An ecommerce that would starting only with selling Apparels on their digital application. As a part of future release they can keep adding other product categories like electronics, groceries etc. When the first product category is launched, you have an opportunity to gather customer feedback, fix any customer irritants and issues before you expand to other product categories.
3) Slicing by delivery channels
Launch your feature different delivery channels one by one
Example – Lets consider a brand that sells Apparels(Clothes) over multiple channels like web application, mobile applications (android and iPhone), Sales orders over call center (phone channel), physical brick and mortar shops. When you introduce a new functionality, you can start by launching it on the application which has least sales. That way, you have less number of applications on which you are doing development at any given point of time. also you have time to gauge the customer feedback on it and do changes accordingly before you launch the same functionality on other channels one after another.