article thumbnail

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
article thumbnail

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

Startup Lessons Learned

But if you want to practice rapid deployment, you need to be able to deploy that build in one step as well. If you want to do continuous deployment, youd better be able to certify that build too, which brings us to. For more on continuous deployment, see Just-in-time Scalability. Can you make a build in one step?

Insiders

Sign Up for our Newsletter

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

article thumbnail

Lessons Learned: The product manager's lament

Startup Lessons Learned

These specs are handed to a designer, who builds layouts and mockups of all the salient points. Then the designs are handed to a team of programmers with various specialties. The programmers keep asking for more say in the designs and direction that they work on. First, he writes it nice and clear.

article thumbnail

The four kinds of work, and how to get them done: part three

Startup Lessons Learned

To begin with, see if you can get designers, programmers, and QA on the same team together. The advantages of cross-functional teams are well documented, and for a thorough treatment I recommend the theory in the second half of Agile Software Development with Scrum. Case Study: Continuous deployment makes releases n.

article thumbnail

Lessons Learned: The lean startup

Startup Lessons Learned

I would add -- think of your development and running your business like a PM/Developer uses Agile or Scrum in software development. Case Study: Continuous deployment makes releases n. Towards a new entrepreneurship ► 2009 (88) ► December (4) Continuous deployment for mission-critical applica.

Lean 168
article thumbnail

Lessons Learned: Built to learn

Startup Lessons Learned

And instead of design, engineering, QA, and operations we have a solution team implementing a startup-centric version of agile development. When people ask about how to reconcile metrics with interaction design, usability testing, or in-person customer interviews, this is the issue they are really talking about. Excellent post.

article thumbnail

Embrace technical debt

Startup Lessons Learned

Like a financial debt, the technical debt incurs interest payments, which come in the form of the extra effort that we have to do in future development because of the quick and dirty design choice. We can choose to continue paying the interest, or we can pay down the principal by refactoring the quick and dirty design into the better design.