Team Focus

With all new construction completed, the focus completely shifts to polishing and readying what was built in preparation for releasing a solution to its target environment(s) (sometimes called focusing on quality, fit, and finish). Because Build Track testing verified that the built solution is in accordance with what was specified, now it is time to stabilize a solution by incrementally improving solution quality until all quality criteria have been satisfied.

Although the team continues to expose, triage, and resolve issues; manage risks; uncover design flaws; and identify unexpected behaviors, what is different is that these activities are done with an eye for wrapping up a solution in preparation for solution deployment. This means that lots of trade-off discussions will occur in which some features and capabilities will be deferred to the next release should a significant issue or delay be discovered. It also means that a project trade-off priority is switched to schedule over features (if it was not already). When a solution is polished enough to solicit user feedback through a pilot, the team focuses on transitioning control of solution deployment to operations.

Table 10-1 describes the focal areas of each advocacy group during a Stabilize Track.

Table 10-1. Team Focal Areas During Stabilization

Advocacy Group	Focus
Product Management	Communications plan execution, launch planning, scope trade-off prioritization
Program Management	Project tracking, constraint and scope trade-offs
Architecture	Issue triage
Development	Issue resolution, solution optimization
User Experience	User documentation stabilization, training materials, user acceptance, usability assessments, training pilot users as well as operations and support teams
Test	Functional, system, and regression testing; issue reporting and status; configuration testing
Release/Operations	Pilot setup and support, deployments, operations and support readiness