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Dual Track Agile as a delivery methodology

26.10.22

by Maike Thorade

Using Dual Track Agile is a delivery methodology that ensures ideas get validated before they are built, making it a cost-effective alternative for businesses. Maike Thorade, Design Lead of Video Experiences, explains the basics of Dual Track Agile and how we apply them at Deltatre

26.10.22

by Maike Thorade

Using Dual Track Agile is a delivery methodology that ensures ideas get validated before they are built, making it a cost-effective alternative for businesses. Maike Thorade, Design Lead of Video Experiences, explains the basics of Dual Track Agile and how we apply them at Deltatre

What is Dual Track Agile?

In a nutshell, Dual Track Agile is an agile methodology that contains two separate tracks – Discovery and Delivery – that work in a parallel loop.

The Discovery track focuses on producing, testing, and validating ideas before building them. The Delivery track on the other hand works on turning those ideas into actual product features.

As the Delivery team work on one set of incremental improvements, the Discovery team can work out what the next feature should be.

The parallel-track nature of the Discovery and Delivery tracks can increase product development velocity. This is due to a cross-functional team being able to make progress on both fronts simultaneously, rather than having one team wait for the other to complete their tasks.

The creation of knowledge is deemed as important as the creation of code and removes assumptions. This ensures that we only implement valuable features for our clients and don’t waste resources and operational costs on features our client’s users don’t need.

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How do the tracks work?

At Deltatre, we dedicate time during Discovery to make sure we understand exactly what to build for our client’s users and importantly, how to define success. We use various multi-disciplinary activities to analyse problem spaces, including the user needs, business goals and technical constraints.

We make this a whole team approach and involve all cross-platform SMEs (Subject Matter Experts, such as Developers, QA Testers, Project Owners, Project Managers and Business Analysts). Everyone brings different expertise to the table to directly shape the product’s direction. This approach means the responsibility for the product’s success is spread across the team.

In a traditional approach, the Delivery track is what most people know as agile development. This track takes the learnings that the Discovery track uncovered and applies them to the product. The aim of the Delivery track is to design, build and release as many useful features and incremental improvements as possible in a sprint.

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How do the Discovery activities fit into the wider picture?

Multiple research activities help product owners to make informed product strategy decisions due to a better understanding of user needs and expectations, competitor landscape and technology restraints.

What happens typically during Discovery?

  • Rather than delivering a solution in a single sprint, we use a Discovery phase to understand the problem we’ve been tasked to solve.
  • To begin, we look at the competitor landscape to understand the problem space we’re operating in. We examine the client’s direct competitors but also look at a wider range of services, bearing in mind that each service has a different target audience.
  • We dive deep into analytics and first-hand user feedback, such as Exit surveys, App Store reviews and Customer Service feedback.
  • We sum up all research findings in suitable documentation and conclude this phase with actionable recommendations. This helps communication and knowledge transfer and serves as a source of truth to refer to throughout the project’s lifecycle.
  • During the multi-disciplinary workshop(s) we go through various ideation exercises. The desired outcome of the workshop(s) is to arrive at the definition of a MVP (Minimal Viable Product) vs Nice-to-Haves.
  • Continuous user testing helps stakeholders with product strategy decisions by gaining insights into user needs and expectations. If there’s ambivalence around the current experience (Control experience) we take a step back and look at the target audience’s satisfaction levels, expectations, and pain points before proceeding. At later stages hypothesis driven variant testing is useful to gain feedback on feature iterations.

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What does our Jira setup look like?

Using two separate Jira boards with distinct workflows is key – a Kanban board for Discovery and a scrum board for Delivery.

The Kanban board features a backlog of unsized epics, which outline problems and opportunities our client is looking to address – ideally backed up by data.

The Scrum board features broken down tickets outlining concrete validated improvements, which get released incrementally.

In contrast to the Kanban board, the Delivery track tickets are sized for transparency and planning purposes.

In summary, why opt for Dual Track Agile?

When the Dual Track Agile methodology is followed on a project, it enables us to:

  • Quickly gather and validate insights.
  • Confidently built the right things due to validating ideas prior to building them.
  • Help businesses to easily change the future direction of the product. Technology trends, requirements, and user tastes can change rapidly.
  • Ensure money only gets spent on development work once features have been validated and we know they bring value to users.

Above all, the value of Dual Track Agile as a delivery methodology lies in the quick and efficient delivery of product improvements, resulting in a modern and frictionless user experience.