The Absurdity of Continuous Publishing

The Agile Transformation of Companies

Agile methods and digital “agile” organizations have become widely adopted in companies, ranging from start-ups and internet pure players to more traditional ones.

Like all major organizational and work method changes, there are a few simple and relevant principles at the core, as expressed in the famous Agile Manifesto (https://agilemanifesto.org/iso/fr/manifesto.html).

These principles can be summarized for businesses by two main objectives:

• Resolve issues of complexity and silos in project organization.
• Design and adapt products over time according to the needs of end users.

This enables companies to be highly responsive to the ever-evolving digital market. Today, having an agile organization for digital projects is essential to avoid appearing as a digital dinosaur.

An Agile Philosophy Dissolved in Tools and Methods

As is often the case when a new work method becomes widespread, the initial spirit (in this case, strong principles rather than specific methods or tools, as indicated in the Agile Manifesto) is often diverted or, to put it more strongly, perverted.

Companies seeking transformation are looking for concrete, “ready-to-use,” and proven methods and tools. What was originally an agile approach or philosophy has transformed into highly structured organizations, methods, and tools. Rituals like Scrum and Feature Teams have become “the norm” for digital teams, regardless of the market, company size, or history.

A symbol of these new practices is the sacred sprint and its rituals. The objective is clear: at the end of each sprint, a product “can” be put in the hands of end users. However, many have turned “can” into an obligation. At the end of each sprint, the product is placed in the hands of users, even if it brings few improvements compared to the previous version (often just two weeks earlier). While it’s difficult to trace updates on websites, app stores provide a history of releases.

The table below lists the estimated update frequency of about ten “blockbuster” applications on the Apple App Store and the size of the applications.

This table shows that most major market players are in a weekly release dynamic. The content of releases is generally labeled as “minor bug fixes and application performance optimization.” It’s practically impossible to deliver a noticeable new feature or technical improvement to users every week.

Nevertheless, such a frenzy of continuous updates is a double absurdity, first in terms of ecology and second in terms of product development.

An Ecological Absurdity

While digital technology has contributed in many ways to reducing pollution (by reducing travel, paper consumption, etc.), it is also a major consumer of electrical energy and raw materials (in equipment and devices construction). Global digital technology “pollutes” three to four times more than France based on the criteria evaluated.

While we have all (almost) modified our daily habits to avoid waste and protect the environment (saving electricity, water, waste sorting, etc.), the digital realm is an area where waste is not accounted for, in other words, a space of significant waste.

Although reducing or controlling digital usage will likely become a medium-term concern for brands and citizens, eliminating waste will become a very immediate concern.

Take the example of the Facebook mobile application. It is updated about fifty times a year. Application stores trigger automatic updates without any action from end users (this default setting on iOS and Android has been in place for several years, and while it can be disabled, very few users take this step).

As a result, whether the update is useful for the user or not, and whether the user frequently or rarely uses Facebook, the application is re-downloaded. This means, for an iOS user, that 12.5 GB are downloaded each year for just updating the Facebook app (not counting usage). Taking into account compression and partial downloads, the total can be estimated at 3–4 GB.

Assuming that active iOS users of Facebook (iPhone + iPad) in France number around 15 million (this is an estimation and may not be entirely accurate but is representative for this calculation), if French iOS Facebook users disabled automatic app updates, switching from a weekly to a monthly schedule, it would save 20 to 30 petabytes of data transmitted over the network and devices annually, equivalent to at least 1500 tons of CO2. This is as much as 1500 round trips from Paris to New York, or the emissions of five fully loaded airplanes.

By simply disabling automatic application updates, users lose very little but take a first step toward more efficient digital consumption. The next step is more challenging: changing usage patterns, reducing video quality for content, refraining from sending unnecessary photos or videos, etc.

Users can also expect application developers to optimize the size of their applications and updates to the maximum, and reduce the frequency of updates. They can request that Google and Apple set the default for automatic updates to off and make it smarter based on the frequency of app usage.

A Product Absurdity

Beyond environmental considerations, such a rapid update cycle doesn’t seem beneficial from a product perspective:

• It’s impossible to introduce new features so regularly without overwhelming the user (an app should be simple enough to be effective).
• While improvements to user experience, performance, and bug fixes can be gradual, they cannot justify an update every two weeks. This indicates difficulty in producing a high-quality application.
• The time spent submitting an application (regression testing, feature selection for the version) inevitably reduces the Project team’s velocity.
• Continuous delivery doesn’t allow enough time for teams to properly analyze user feedback and technical performance indicators.

In many B2C market players, there’s a significant imbalance between the time spent in upfront design/product evolution and the time spent analyzing market behavior afterward. The product is always evolving.

It’s challenging to gauge marketing and technical performance under these conditions. The high release rate also generates its share of regressions and bugs, which must be resolved in the next sprint, maintaining an infernal pace.

While short iterations, adapted as the project progresses, have undoubtedly brought many positives to projects, it is regrettable that every iteration results in a publication. Paradoxically, this doesn’t improve the product’s maturity and quality.

It seems necessary to break the cycle of continuous publishing:

• By limiting the number of application releases so that each one brings a real concrete benefit to users. Releases should be irregular and spaced further apart.
• This doesn’t prevent teams from maintaining short sprints or iterations but without the systematic pressure of “going live.”
• The nature of sprints should be diversified, allowing more time for user behavior analysis, technical performance analysis, etc., by the teams that handle development.

Conclusion

The digital realm is entering an era of maturity and responsibility. Continuous publications, on the web or in application stores, for many publishers, are an initial symbol that needs to change in digital culture. Publishers must slow down the pace of releases, think twice before publishing, and take into account that unnecessary data is being transferred on the internet, causing pollution. Although this pollution is minimal for individual users, it becomes significant on a larger scale.

“Reasoned” publishing should also place a greater emphasis on quality and the analysis of user behavior in production. Apple and Google should educate the market and integrate sustainability into the user experience. The convenience of automatic app updates may not have been an ecological advance; it needs to be reconsidered, deactivated by default, or made active only for the most frequently used apps.

This is the first step toward a more sustainable digital future, which will become increasingly essential for market players and consumers in this new decade.