Overcoming Fear when Increasing Release Cadence at Scale Using “Fear Conversations” to navigate difficult conversations and mitigate fear

An organisation of 15 teams decided to move from bi-annual releases to fortnightly releases in under four months. How do you overcome the team's fear they could not maintain quality?

This session covers the fears 15 teams and their IT management faced when driving throughput from bi-yearly releases to fortnightly releases in under four months. All 15 teams were working on a single shared monolith. We had an initial plan. We knew how to kickstart the Continuous Delivery adoption… but plans are worthless once the change has started. Six months after achieving the fortnightly release cadence with Continuous Delivery, I realised it was not the plan that helped the organisation. Instead, Fear Conversations (from the book Agile Conversations) guided us. The increase in release frequency was not their biggest problem. Neither was the monolith. Instead, the teams worried they could not maintain quality while accelerating the release cadence. They were afraid. Rather than avoiding those fears, we used Fear Conversations to surface them. They allowed us to uncover, locate and understand the stakeholders’ fears. To then mitigate these fears and navigate the difficult conversations we had to have in order to define incremental improvements. Our conversations exposed the following fears: - Fear of version control branching complexity. - Fear of missing key release steps during fortnightly releases. - Fear of missing deadlines due to a single pipeline failure. - Fear of bugs due to flaky tests. If you thought adopting Continuous Delivery is easy, think again! It’s not just technology, it’s about humans and their fears.