Feature flow

Feature flow is an agile practice that seeks to provide value as quickly as possible by focusing teams on individual units of value, called “features”. Ideally, a team works on one feature at a time [1].

A feature remains a team focus until it’s providing value. It’s not enough, for example, for software to be checked in with tests passing. It must be in front of customers or otherwise providing stakeholder value.

How it works

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Feature flow uses a two-level board. At the top level, is a feature board, showing features in progress or in the product backlog. The feature board provides a high-level view so stakeholders can see what’s in progress and prioritize the backlog.

When a feature enters development, a task board is used for the feature. This is the low-level view.

At any point in time, there’s feature board and 0 or more task boards, however, there should usually be only one or two task boards.

Core concepts

Board
A board provides a place for a team to track their work.
Feature

Features are units of value.

We use the term feature rather than value to emphasize visibility.

A feature will often encompass multiple stories, depending on the granularity of stories. A feature should be as small as possible and still provide value [2].

Task

Features are broken into tasks, so that work may be subdivided and that progress may be tracked. Features can be small enough to have a single task. That is a good thing, because it means that value can be recognized sooner, but typically features require multiple tasks.

When a feature enters a development state, a task board for the feature is used, allowing the team to coordinate effort to drive the feature to completion.

How it’s implemented

Feature flow can be implemented in a number of ways:

  • You can implement feature flow with a feature board and a collection of task boards, either using a software tool or sticky-notes on physical boards.

  • You can use a single board with big cards for features and sticky notes for tasks. When a feature enters a development state, you can move the stickies between development task states.

  • Possibly using a tool that supports complex workflows.

  • The Valuenator application.

    The Valuenator open source application is an attempt to automate the practice in a simple and opinionated way. There’s a demo version you can try without installing or signing up for anything to get a feel for the mechanics of the practice.

However it’s implemented, it’s important that the implementation makes it easy to see everything relevant to a team at once. This is one reason why we think that a more specialized and opinionated tool has value.

How it fits in with other agile practices

Like any other agile practice, feature flow is a part of a larger agile process that teams should tailor to their needs and experience through a process of “inspect and adapt”. Just as software should be built incrementally, so should you evolve your agile processes incrementally. Feature flow is one part.

Feature flow is an alternative to Scrum sprints. Rather than organizing work into fixed time increments, feature flow organizes around units of value. Features play a similar role to sprints, focusing a team on a shared goal and features are often similar in size to sprints.

Organizing around value rather than time has a number of advantages:

  • It focuses the team on what’s important to stakeholders.

    This may, for example, include activities outside of traditional development, such as deployment or training, because the team is focused on achieving value, not just finishing promised work.

  • It provides value as soon as possible, not just at sprint boundaries.

  • Much less time is spent in sprint planning, because there aren’t sprints.

  • Team improvement can be considered at any time, rather than at sprint boundaries, because there’s less emphasis on deadlines.

Feature flow isn’t new. Feature flow can be seen as an instance of continuous flow, in that there’s team focus on individual backlog items.

Feature flow is based on two-tiered Kanban boards as described in the book Kanban, by David Anderson (and elsewhere).

Feature flow can and should be used with other agile practices, as part of a larger process.

[1]In practice, when a feature is nearing completion, there may not be enough work left to occupy the whole team, so the team may start another, however, the top priority of the team is getting the first task finished.
[2]In a continuous-deployment environment, you might deploy subsets of features, with subsets not user-visible. This can help to avoid large software changes, to mitigate the risk of breakage. It can be argued that this provides value, but it’s value that’s not really visible to stake holders. Which isn’t to say that feature flow and continuous deployment can’t be used together, but they represent different kinds of flow.