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Lessons Learned: Combining agile development with customer development

Startup Lessons Learned

In most agile development systems, there is a notion of the "product backlog" a prioritized list of what software is most valuable to be developed next. The breakthrough idea of agile is that software should be built iteratively, with the pieces that customers value most created first. Hes often felt that there was something missing.

Agile 111
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Lessons Learned: The lean startup

Startup Lessons Learned

But by taking advantage of open source, agile software, and iterative development, lean startups can operate with much less waste. I am heavily indebted to earlier theorists, and highly recommend the books Lean Thinking and Lean Software Development. Case Study: Continuous deployment makes releases n. No more, no less.

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

Startup Lessons Learned

I am convinced one of Joel Spolskys lasting contributions to the field of managing software teams will turn out to be the Joel Test , a checklist of 12 essential practices that you could use to rate the effectiveness of a software product development team. For more on continuous deployment, see Just-in-time Scalability.

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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. So the product manager winds up actually having to use the software, by hand, updating the spec and helping create a new test plan. Case Study: Continuous deployment makes releases n. Frustration is mounting.

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Embrace technical debt

Startup Lessons Learned

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. The human tendency to moralize about debt affects engineers, too. Although it costs to pay down the principal, we gain by reduced interest payments in the future. One last thought.

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Lessons Learned: Built to learn

Startup Lessons Learned

No engineering team. But where it makes sense, that team may also include engineers building new experiments or prototypes to try with customers. And instead of design, engineering, QA, and operations we have a solution team implementing a startup-centric version of agile development. You need a problem team and a solution team."

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You don't need as many tools as you think

Startup Lessons Learned

Heres something I can relate to: We used assembla for subversion, scrums, milestones, wikis, and for general organizational purposes. Scrum reports would come in once a month, nobody was actually responsible for anything. My favorite instance of this is scheduling software. Case Study: Continuous deployment makes releases n.