Before agile many companies and teams considered a three month release cycle as aggressive, an annual release was more common. Agile started to ask teams to make fortnightly releases, or at the very least be able to release every two weeks. Being releasable was more important than actual releasing because staying at a releasable standard forced teams to keep a high technical standard and thus gave options to the business customers.
The best digital teams have now accelerated far beyond every two week. The Guardian newspaper in London commonly releases several thousand times a week and Amazon.com releases on average every 11 seconds.
A release every two weeks still looks like an impossible challenge to an average team – typically one working inside some large corporation. But for the best teams a two week gap between releases looks like an eternity.
The link between a project end date and a software release is well an truly broken. The parameters of date, scope and quality at the heart of the project model are managed completely differently.
Source: “Continuous Digital – An agile alternative to projects”, Allan Kelly, https://leanpub.com/cdigital/