Valley of Death

I have started reading “Succeeding with Agile” written by Mike Cohn. I got this book  free when we attended the Agile tour Bangalore. So far, it has been a pretty good read. I had assumed that Mike would preach the ideal way of doing agile like having dedicated scrum master etc. but seems to give surprisingly practical alternatives( which we are following in CDC Software).

Before he starts explaining the process he begins with why a company decides to adopt scrum. One of the reasons he gave is “Valley of death”. It can be best explained with a diagram –

The black line is the revenue a company earns from its old product. The company then decides to work on a new cool product. So all its development resources are put into building this all-new product. After some time, the revenue from the old product starts reducing since the customers of the old product realise that they are not getting anything new.  The revenue from the new product has not yet started since the development is still working on it. This creates a sudden decline in the revenues of a company, but they cannot make reduction in R&D costs since the new product is still under development. This causes huge amounts of losses and death of a few companies. The companies that do survive this phase will start increasing the revenues again from their new product.

The valley of death makes perfect sense to me as Pivotal went through the exact same scenario. We stopped working on major enhancements for Pivotal 5.9 and worked on Sedna(Pivotal 6.0) for close to 2 years. This is a huge risk to take and management would prefer never to see another valley of death.

One of the ways to avoid valley of death is to adopt agile development methodologies. With frequent releases and incremental development, the large gap between releases can be eliminated and hence the dip can be avoided. 

Although agile helps avoiding the valley of death, people in R&D are already tired and bored of frequent releases as service packs. People have started to ask whether we will ever have the next version of Pivotal 7.0.  I feel that the excitement and enthusiasm of a new release has been lost. How can we keep enthusiasm amongst the R&D teams and still release every 3 – 4 months?  

Please do comment.