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Lessons Learned: Combining agile development with customer development

Startup Lessons Learned

XP and Scrum don’t have much to say - they punt. If you look at the origins of most agile systems, including Scrum and XP , they come out of experiences in big companies. Both Scrum and XP had a role which you could happily call by the modern title "Product Manager". Embedded in that assumption is why startups fail.

Agile 111
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Lessons Learned: The lean startup

Startup Lessons Learned

See Customer Development Engineering for my first stab at articulating the theory involved) Ferocious customer-centric rapid iteration, as exemplified by the Customer Development process. I would add -- think of your development and running your business like a PM/Developer uses Agile or Scrum in software development. No more, no less.

Lean 168
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Lessons Learned: A new version of the Joel Test (draft)

Startup Lessons Learned

At IMVU , our engineering team accumulated thousands upon thousands of tests, and we had a build cluster (using BuildBot ) that ran them. There are several ways to make progress evident - the Scrum team model is my current favorite. At IMVU, our rule was that a new engineer needed to push code to production on their first day.

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Lessons Learned: The product manager's lament

Startup Lessons Learned

The VP Engineering spends all of his time trying to make sure the programmers understand and implement the spec. Eventually, I hope to get them on a full agile diet, with TDD, scrums, sprints, pair programming, and more. Tell your Startup Visa story Speaking 2010: Webstock, GDC, Web 2.0, Frustration is mounting.

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Lessons Learned: ScienceDaily: Corporate culture is most important.

Startup Lessons Learned

At IMVU , we called this person a Producer (revealing our games background); in Scrum , they are called the Product Owner. Thus the power of the Chief Engineer is very large even though he (and they are all men so far) has no direct reports other than a secretary and a few assistants who are themselves being trained to be chief engineers.

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Embrace technical debt

Startup Lessons Learned

The human tendency to moralize about debt affects engineers, too. This reverses the standard intuition about what engineering activities add value, which usually concludes that test coverage is a form of necessary waste but a refactoring is value-added work. These kinds of design are mostly orthogonal.

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Social, Agile, and Transformation: Strategic Agile Thinking: Balancing Value, Innovation and Research

ctotodevelopers.blogspot.com

The implementation and architecture can also suffer if the team under or over invests engineering time, implementation of standards, or testing discipline in the wrong areas. ► 2010. (14). No Scrum Master? This, in some way, is a byproduct of self organization. ► March. (1). Agile Process Improvement Using.

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