Start Your Idea
30
Nov, 2022

The Journey from POC to MVP to PMF: 5 things that every startup founder needs to know

The concept of a minimum viable product (MVP) is now pervasive. But it is not the only way to think about market development for new products. What’s the right way to be entrepreneurial, especially if you work in a highly regulated industry like finance?

MVP reflects a widely acceptable view that innovation is often experimental, and perhaps nowhere more experimental than in the startup community where entrepreneurs are, in effect, building a hypothesis about a product and its suitability for the market.

Product-Market Fit is an on older idea. It has much more fluidity about it – rather than proposing a series of iteration cycles it better reflects the reality of much entrepreneurship.  Whatever the merits of  product, and however aligned with customers, there is nonetheless an x factor that allows some products fly while others stay grounded.

The challenge to startup growth can be the presence of oligopolies or market entry barriers that come from deeply entrenched incumbents.  This is very much the case in financial services. To date very few startups have managed to breakthrough as alternative providers. The banking community, by and large, already has a tier of suppliers in its core system portfolio. Why would they need another? The answer is process model innovation. Banks, and financial service companies, need processes that radically reduce costs and, potentially, provide new services.

But in a game where oligopolies still rule what do terms like MVP and Product Market Fit mean for startups?

1. Market Validation

Andreessen is not the only one who has emphasized the importance of so-called product-market fit in determining a startup’s success or failure. Research from CBinsights supports this notion, finding that 42% of startup failures were due to a lack of market need. The lesson we can distill from this is, “don’t offer something people don’t want.”

Essentially, those failed startups did not achieve market validation.

Market validation is the way to confirm that your idea is a solution to a problem people actually have.

Some business advisors define market validation as a survey distributed to specific user segments, testing their attachment to your solution. However, we take the view that market validation is not a single action or event, but the thread that ties your whole business model together from proof of concept (POC) to product-market fit (PMF).

You don’t need a minimum viable product (MVP), or even a prototype, to start market validation. You just need an idea, open ears, and honest tongues. As soon as you have an idea you want to execute, you should talk about it!

First, you can ask friends, family, and other founders and entrepreneurs you know. Then, to the greatest extent possible, reach outside of your network to hear from people that are more likely to give it to you straight. If you get to this point, and everyone has told you it’s a stupid idea, you should probably consider the possibility that it is, indeed, a stupid idea.

If your idea is validated through your internal and external network, you should design and write a plan to continue market validation through your product development cycle. An initial step is to define your market. Who will be using your product? Whose pain point are you helping to alleviate?

Here are some basic questions to help you construct customer profiles and define your market:

  • What types of companies do potential customers work for?
  • How big is the company?
  • What is their job title?
  • How will this product improve their lives/jobs?
  • How can you find them?

If you can answer these questions, you are on your way to defining your market. This will be helpful when you are ready to launch a beta and reach out to your potential users. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves! Before any testing: alpha, beta, or otherwise, you will need to prove your concept.

2. POC: Proof Of Concept

A proof of concept (POC) is an exercise in which work is focused on determining whether an idea can be turned into a reality. A proof of concept is meant to determine the feasibility of the idea or to verify that the idea will function as envisioned.

It is sometimes also known as proof of principle.

A proof of concept is not intended to explore market demand for the idea, nor is it intended to determine the best production process.

Rather, its focus is to test whether the idea is viable — giving those involved in the proof-of-concept exercise the opportunity to explore the idea’s potential to be developed or built.

In software development, for example, a proof of concept would show whether an idea is feasible from a technology standpoint. For startups, a proof of concept would demonstrate financial viability.

Developing a proof of concept generally requires some investment of time or other resources, such as supporting technologies or necessary physical components to complete. Going through this process, however, enables companies to determine an idea’s viability before putting production-level resources behind an untested idea.

Developing a proof of concept can help a product owner to identify potential technical and logistical issues that might interfere with success. It also provides the opportunity for an organization to solicit internal feedback about a promising product or service, while reducing unnecessary risk and exposure and providing the opportunity for stakeholders to assess design choices early in the development cycle.

The individual or team going through this process can then use a successful proof of concept to convince stakeholders, managers or investors that the idea is worth pursuing further.

3. Prototype — Demonstrate the “How” of your Software Project

Prototyping is the fourth phase of both design thinking and design sprints. It’s an essential part of user experience (UX) design that usually comes after ideation, where you/your team have created and selected ideas that can solve users’ needs. In prototyping, you craft a simple experimental model of your proposed product so you can check how well it matches what users want through the feedback they give. You should consider prototyping from early on—using paper prototyping, if appropriate—so the feedback you gather from users can help guide development.

The advantages of prototyping are that you:

  1. Have a solid foundation from which to ideate towards improvements—giving all stakeholders a clear picture of the potential benefits, risks and costs associated with where a prototype might lead.
  2. Can adapt changes early—thereby avoiding commitment to a single, falsely-ideal version, getting stuck on local maxima of UX and later incurring heavy costs due to oversights.
  3. Show the prototype to your users so they can give you their feedback to help pinpoint which elements/variants work best and whether an overhaul is required.
  4. Have a tool to experiment with associated parts of the users’ needs and problems—therefore, you can get insights into less-obvious areas of the users’ world (e.g., you notice them using it for additional purposes or spot unforeseen accessibility issues such as challenges to mobile use).
  5. Provide a sense of ownership to all concerned stakeholders—therefore fostering emotional investment in the product’s ultimate success.
  6. Improve time-to-market by minimizing the number of errors to correct before product release.

4. MVP: Minimum Viable Product

A minimum viable product (MVP) is a concept from Lean Startup that stresses the impact of learning in new product development. Eric Ries, defined an MVP as that version of a new product which allows a team to collect the maximum amount of validated learning about customers with the least effort. This validated learning comes in the form of whether your customers will actually purchase your product.

A key premise behind the idea of MVP is that you produce an actual product (which may be no more than a landing page, or a service with an appearance of automation, but which is fully manual behind the scenes) that you can offer to customers and observe their actual behavior with the product or service. Seeing what people actually do with respect to a product is much more reliable than asking people what they would do.

The primary benefit of an MVP is you can gain understanding about your customers’ interest in your product without fully developing the product. The sooner you can find out whether your product will appeal to customers, the less effort and expense you spend on a product that will not succeed in the market.

Teams use the term MVP, but don’t fully understand its intended use or meaning. Often this lack of understanding manifests in believing that an MVP is the smallest amount of functionality they can deliver, without the additional criteria of being sufficient to learn about the business viability of the product.

Teams may also confuse an MVP–which has a focus on learning–for a Minimum Marketable Feature (MMF) or Minimum Marketable Product (MMP)–which has a focus on earning. There’s not too much harm in this unless the team becomes too focused on delivering something without considering whether it is the right something that satisfies customer’s needs.

Teams stress the minimum part of MVP to the exclusion of the viable part. The product delivered is not sufficient quality to provide an accurate assessment of whether customers will use the product.

Teams deliver what they consider an MVP, and then do not do any further changes to that product, regardless of feedback they receive about it.

Proper use of an MVP means that a team may dramatically change a product that they deliver to their customers or abandon the product together based on feedback they receive from their customers. The minimum aspect of MVP encourages teams to do the least amount of work possible to useful feedback (Eric Ries refers to this as validated learning) which helps them avoid working on a product that no one wants.

5. PMF: Recognizing Product-Market Fit

Product-market fit describes a scenario in which a company’s target customers are buying, using, and telling others about the company’s product in numbers large enough to sustain that product’s growth and profitability.

According to entrepreneur and investor Marc Andreesen, who is often credited with developing the concept, product-market fit means finding a good market with a product capable of satisfying that market.

Alex Schultz, Facebook’s VP of Growth, says the biggest problem he sees facing the companies he advises is that they don’t have product-market fit when they think they do.

So, why is achieving it so important? Why do many venture capitalists demand evidence of product-market fit before investing in a company? Why does Andreesen, in fact, believe in the division of every startup’s life into two key stages: before product-market fit (BPMF) and after product-market fit (APMF)?

The answer is simple: Before you develop a product that you confirm enough people are willing to pay for, your team cannot afford to focus on other important strategic objectives such as growth or upselling existing users. Those initiatives could even be counterproductive, in fact, if you haven’t first determined that your product has enough of a market to sustain itself and generate a profit.

We generally associate the concept with marketing and product management. In reality, achieving it is a shared responsibility across the company. Sales, business development, support, finance, and all other departments help the company reach this important milestone.

No single set of metrics can tell any business when it achieves product-market fit. But Andrew Chen, a venture capitalist, offers some signals that a company is heading in the right direction with its offering:

  • When surveying potential customers or allowing them to test your product, does some segment indicate they will switch to your product?
  • Are some users who have rejected similar products on the market willing to try yours?
  • When user testing, do people group your product accurately with the right competitive offerings?
  • Do users demonstrate an understanding of your product’s differentiators or unique value proposition?
  • How do your underlying metrics (such as retention rates of users) measure up against those of your competitors?

Chen’s signals represent a mix of both qualitative and quantitative metrics. This is by design. Whatever methods your team uses to gauge success, you will want to include a mix of both as well. For example:

Quantitative:

  • NPS score
  • Churn rate
  • Growth rate
  • Market share

Qualitative:

  • Word of mouth. (As Andreesen says, if your customers talk about your products with others, they effectively become your product’s sales reps.)
  • Calls from the media or industry analysts come in much more frequently, and coverage of your product and company increases.

Just as the best way to measure product-market fit will differ for each company, there is no single path to achieving it. In his book, The Lean Product Playbook, Dan Olsen offers one high-level method that can help get your team started:

1. Determine your target customer

2. Identify underserved needs of that customer

3. Define your value proposition

4. Specify your minimum viable product (MVP) feature set

5. Develop your MVP

6. Test your MVP with customers

Then, based on those user tests and surveys, use metrics like the ones suggested above, from Andrew Chen, to determine if you’re headed in the right direction.

28
Nov, 2022

6 reasons why you should develop products like a startup

Every business founder, CTO, CEO, or product owner has to find the right product development strategy to suit their company’s business goals.

There are lots of different product development strategies out there and no real one size fits all rule when it comes to product management and development. 

One definite thing is that the complete product development strategy is crucial for any business if it wants to get out ahead of the competition by building a better product. 

Startups move faster, collaborate better and aren’t trapped by corporate bureaucracy or hidebound ways of thinking. But if you want your company or business units to act more like startups in their software development process, it helps to understand how startups really work and at what stages of their development. As you adopt the things that work for startups, you’ll need to be cognizant that your business units will need to grow and mature just like successful startups do.

Here are six ideas to innovate like a startup while avoiding common startup pitfalls:

1. Form smaller teams with leaders that carry a deep product understanding and are steeped in innovation ideas.

Amazon famously popularized the “two-pizza rule” in its early days. If you couldn’t feed the people in your meeting with two pizzas, you had too many people in the project for it to be productive.

The same holds true when forming product and development teams. Six to eight people on a team is plenty; five is even better for faster decision-making and higher productivity. Just make sure you have the right leaders in place for these teams. Team leaders at this stage or size have to be hands-on player-coaches who are innovative thinkers, passionate about understanding the solution and eager to interact with end users to collect feedback. 

2. Listen to your customers (clients)

You can’t have a successful software development initiative without understanding customers’ pain points and how other tools in the market are failing to meet those needs.

Don’t be afraid to allow your customers to participate in the innovation process as opposed to developing solutions in search of problems. This will also help you to take your products to where the market opportunity is and avoid the single-product mindset, instead developing complementary product lines on the same codebase.

3. Measure success based on innovation, not on people or budgets.

Since you’ll be keeping your teams small and lean like any startup worth its salt, staff and budget numbers shouldn’t be the defining barrier. Innovation is the only metric that counts. Are you expanding your product’s capabilities? Are you introducing new technology into the market before the competition? Are you reusing software assets to develop new product lines and move beyond the single-product mindset?

Creating the right culture and right talent to lead at this stage is critical for companies to continue to innovate, drive results and more importantly, establish a strong “product culture.” Following this course provides a foundation for a single-product company to be able to expand to a multi-product company and continue to maintain its startup culture as well as a fast pace of innovation.

4. Put a process in place that allows for continuous innovation and continuous deployment (CI/CD).

Modern agile software development requires constant updates as new features are added, tested and put into production. This process requires building a CI/CD pipeline. You establish the source code for a development project, build the software using your tool of choice, test the software to make sure it’s behaving properly and free of coding errors and, finally, deploy the software once it’s passed quality control. As you make daily changes and updates, you go through this routine continuously.

You can automate this process, using commercial or open source tools, and avoid errors that turn into bugs. Customers appreciate your innovation and ideas and expect you to be able to solve problems for them that other firms haven’t figured out yet — but they still need your product to work.

5. Use solution-minded development techniques along with agile.

Agile development methods are great for supporting collaboration among remote teams, responding to changes faster, creating a feedback loop for continuous improvement and generally speeding up the product development lifecycle. This allows for a ton of features to be developed in short order. 

As the company gets a chance to establish the early customer base for its product, processes tighten and become more disciplined. The startup now must manage the innovation cycle in SaaS in context with maintaining product quality and delivering the product to the customer efficiently.

When the innovation cycles are short and new features are added rapidly, it is critically important to tie the innovation cycle to a solution. This is where the traditional software development approach still has its place, especially in terms of setting out the solution context and persona of the end user. You can still use agile sprints, but with controls in place for solution validation so that the final software you develop looks more like what you set out to do and what your customers want.

6. Foster a spirit of collaboration between product management and product marketing.

Once you’ve developed a new product, you need to make sure that it resonates with buyers and shows them how it can solve their pain points. This is where product marketing comes in.

Getting your product management and product marketing teams on the same page will lead to better alignment of vision, strategy and tactics and make you more responsive to your customers’ needs. Product marketing principles will provide a strong wrapper around the product development and make the end users appreciate the rapid development cycle to meet their feature demands.

Adopting some of the best traits of startups can help any development organization to raise their innovation game, become more responsive to customers and bring products to market faster. But startups have enough of a track record now to know what works and what doesn’t. The above steps should give you a baseline to form innovation centers inside your organization, improve your customer relations and gain new relevancy in the market.

15
Sep, 2022

How long does it take to build a custom mobile app?

Whenever you are planning to build an app, the first and foremost question that would come to your mind is the time it takes to build an app. You want to know as it helps you determine the product timeline and set up a plan for your product launch. The duration may vary based upon the scope of the project and the process you follow.

A smaller app will take shorter time compared to a bigger app.  I will take an example of three apps with varying size and then will show you typically how long it takes to complete those apps. This will give you an idea of how long your app might take.

I am taking the example of Instagram App, I have listed all the features in existing App and grouped features to make a small sized, mid sized and large sized Instagram app.

This table will help you determine in which category your app falls.

Features Small Version Mid Size Version Large Version
Login/Signup with Email, Facebook, Forgot Pswd, Change Password
Yes
Yes
Yes
Newsfeed with activities
Yes
Yes
Yes
Access Phone Camera, Take Photo, Add/Upload Photo from Gallery, post in the app.
Yes
Yes
Yes
Follow/Following Other Users
Yes
Yes
Yes
Share Photo Facebook
Yes
Yes
Yes
Search Users, View User Profiles, Edit Profile
Yes
Yes
Yes
Connect to Facebook Friends, Invite Facebook Friends
Yes
Yes
Yes
Like & Comment
Yes
Yes
Yes
Login/Signup with Phone No, Phonebook Access, Invite phone contacts to the app.
No
Yes
Yes
Share to Followers or Direct (While sharing photo/video, user can select whether they want to share with their followers or Direct with their friends)
No
Yes
Yes
Add Story in the app (It is listed on Top of the Homepage. It is basically photo/video added with story/description. When you click on any user profile photo, it will open photo/video and story added by the user. App will run user Story in a slider.)
No
Yes
Yes
Add Emoticons with Photo and Video
No
Yes
Yes
Capture Video, Add/Upload video in the post. Video Playing.
No
Yes
Yes
Push Notifications
No
Yes
Yes
Add Locations, Tag People in Photo/Video
No
Yes
Yes
Share on Twitter, Tumblr, Flickr
No
Yes
Yes
Messaging/Chatting
No
No
Yes
Apply Filters & Photo Editing
No
No
Yes
See Following Activity
No
No
Yes
Advanced Upload Settings
No
No
Yes
Suggestions by App for users and content
No
No
Yes
Multilingual App
No
No
Yes

How Long it takes to do scoping and the requirements

You want to capture the feature list, create detailed requirements and scope of the app. If you are good at it, you can do it in 1-2 weeks for a smaller app, 2-3 weeks for a mid-sized app and 3-4 weeks for a bigger app. You will have to look at other apps in the market and decide what features are important for your mobile app

Small App Mid Size App Big Size App
1-2 weeks
2-3 weeks
3-4 weeks

How long it takes to do UI/UX Design is needed?

The process requires creating the wireframes for the mobile application based on the requirements and review/adjust them. Once wireframes are done, the graphical UI design needs to be completed which includes font, color, theme, and images for the App.

Small App Mid Size App Big Size App
2-3 weeks
5-6 weeks
9-10 weeks

How long it takes to do development and testing?

Most of startups and individuals want to build apps with lots of features imaginable.  Based on the feature list and type of company, will determine the time it takes to develop the app. You will need to build the mobile app and also the backend for the mobile app. All development: iOS App, Android App, and the backend should happen in parallel. For the smaller version, it can be achieved in 2 months, a mid-sized app can take around 3-3.5 months while a big sized app might take around 5-6 months. This will involve technical architecture, UI coding, backend setup, functional implementation, integration, and testing.

Small App Mid Size App Big Size App
6-7 weeks
14-15 Weeks
20-22 Weeks

How much time to do beta testing and deployment?

Once your app is fully developed, you want to do beta testing to find out additional possible bugs. You can spend 1-3 weeks on beta testing depending on the size of your app.

Small App Mid Size App Big Size App
1 week
2 weeks
3 weeks

As you can see that time for each step will depend upon the size of the app. At a high level, you want to keep around 10-12 weeks for a small app, 23-25 weeks for a mid-sized app and 35-38 weeks for a large sized app.

You’re having an idea about a new app, just tell us and we can create amazing things together.

26
Jul, 2022

12 Principles To Guarantee Project\’s Quality (Part 2)

In part one of this article, I told you about 6 Principles To Guarantee Project’s Quality. Here are 6 things left to create the perfect quality for a technology project.

7. Hold a kickoff meeting

As the first meeting between members of the project team and, potentially, the client or sponsor, the kick-off meeting is an excellent opportunity to establish expectations and create strong team morale.

Your kick-off is a time to introduce the team to the project, decide on teamwork, and set project goals and check-ins. You might want to outline how you’ll communicate, meet, and what could slow down the process (and how to avoid that).

Our typical project kick-off meeting agenda:

  • Team Roles – introduce team and what they will be responsible for.
  • Vision statement – like “For <customer>, the <project name> does / provides / solves <problem / solution statement>. Unlike <competitor / comparison point>, it will <differentiator>.”
  • Project Scope – You present the MVP features we need to deliver. It would be great to cover also a high-level epic journey: What user personas are involved? Where it fits in the user experience? NOTE: people will know the documentation you provided before the meeting.
  • Timeline and Metrics – Sponsor presents his point of view on Trade-off so we can make smaller decisions quickly and autonomously. Refer to the Trade-off Sliders play for full instructions.
  • Success factors (group session) – to engage people. Ask everyone to write down what they think will make this project a success. Have the team post up their ideas. Discuss how you could measure each one.
  • RAID (group session) – like the previous sessions, but focusing on risks.
    • Risks – things that could happen, and would affect the quality, timing or cost of the project (or a combination).
    • Assumptions – things that are currently true and form the basis for a plan, but any change in them would create risk or issue.
    • Issues – things that have already happened that adversely affect the project.
    • Dependencies – things that need to be done or provided, either once or regularly, to make the project a success.
  • Team communication plan – Here I will discuss how we will communicate – how often, in what form, etc.

8. Prepare and estimate the project requirements using Planning Poker

The project requirements have to be listed out and then estimated. Scrum and agile methodologies approaches require that you create a Product Backlog for this task. Once you have your list, you should leave the estimation to the people who will be working on those items. In Agile management, the estimation must be done by someone on the team to be considered valid.

Planning Poker ends up with assigning a score for each item on the list. Note that scores represent the amount of effort each item will require. They haven’t been attached to a timeline yet.

Planning Pocker estimating method brings multiple benefits for the project:

  • encourages team collaboration and team building
  • conversational style can provoke valuable insights from software development team who might not have a platform to discuss their opinions and experiences otherwise
  • requiring individuals to defend their predictions results in estimates that more adequately adjust for missing data
  • improves estimate accuracy, especially on items with a lot of uncertainty

9. Measure work progress using the definition of “done”

While Agile software development teams are defined as cross-functional, they come with some limits. For example, not every software development project will include a lawyer in their team.

The limited nature of cross-functional teams is used to gauge how much the team will deliver in each cycle. If something appears and it is outside the team’s knowledge, it will be done pre-work or at the end of the cycle or even concurrently with the development team.

To obtain a better understanding of this work you can create an organization-wide value stream map for project delivery. By creating this map, you will find out the amount of time spent on each type of work. If you take out the work that has to be done by the Agile team, you will obtain a clear image of the work that needs to be done outside the team.

The amount of work found in the value stream map is a good start for setting up the budget based on the project’s cycle labor costs.

10. Do risk assessments regularly

Every project comes with risks. Risks are problems that may arise over the course of project development. Project management has the task of identifying and reducing risk beginning at the project planning phase. We recommend you plan a meeting to discuss this or simply ask all the team members about what risks may arise.

When considering risks, you should look into these areas:

  • Project Scope
  • Resources (staff, financial, and physical)
  • Project delays
  • Failures of Technology or Communication

Complete control over all potential risks is impossible, so you should focus on considering them early on to avoid project failure.

Here’s an example of the technical risk management plan:

11. Communicate, Communicate, Communicate

Agile manifesto encourages developers to communicate better by putting team collaboration. When using agile model, the team members work closely with the stakeholders, resulting in improved decision making, and better customer satisfaction. Using task management software can help increase efficiency.

Keep in mind that agile methodology needs solid communication between the client and the offshore development team to achieve project goals and ensure proper software delivery.

Honesty is important in this relationship. Because of some cultural differences, a common situation is that software developers avoid speaking their minds for fear of upsetting the client. Sometimes misunderstandings can appear, caused by filling the knowledge gaps with wrong information.

Frequent team visits and other team building activities are a great addition, but communication tools, outsourcing vendor company culture and business processes guarantee outsourcing model success.

The point is that there’s nothing such as over-communication in agile software development. To set the project for a great result, we recommend setting up as many communication channels as you can.

Communication In Agile

Outsourcing vendor appoints at least one member in their team who speaks fluently in the client’s native language to represent the client accurately. This person’s role usually falls into the categories of Engineering Lead or a certified Scrum professional. You should consider an individual that can hold this responsibility, and it’s known to be reliable.

On the other side, clients have to name a dedicated representative, that is very familiar with the knowledge and can communicate efficiently with the offshore development team.

Poor Communication Strategy

The client’s representative is usually authorized to accept changes or approve work.

12. Continually seek excellence

19
Jul, 2022

12 Principles To Guarantee Project\’s Quality (Part 1)

When you implement agile outsourcing it might appear incompatible to merge agile processes and outsourcing. The agile techniques, with its emphasis on collaboration, frequently contrasts with the traditional outsourcing paradigm, which necessitates contracting with providers whose employees are educated primarily to follow direction rather than collaborate.

By mixing in-house and vendor teams you can still implement agile methodology while continuing to outsource and have benefits such as lower fixed costs and increased access to desirable skill sets. The key to success with agile outsourcing is to get a partner that can handle the dynamics of validated learning smoothly with a solid software development process, both on the software design and engineering side.

1. Guide your product vision with validated learning

In the beginning, you should focus on defining the goals, business value, and success criteria of your project. By doing this you gain a clear image of your intentions and ideal endpoint. You need straightforward goals to be able to create a realistic plan to accomplish them and achieve client’s long term success.

Our advice for creating a solid plan for your project is to look at the bigger picture. These next questions can help you do that:

  • Are you addressing a specific problem? Can you define the problem?
  • What is the end goal?
  • Which team members will be essential for this project?

After you finished outlining your goals you can follow these steps to plan the delivery:

  • Agree on the necessary features
  • Establish the amount of work your team needs to complete for every sprint
  • Include interactions and stories until you reach maximum capacity
  • Show your plan and gather opinions and feedback on it

Learning is the key ingredient for a successful agile software development project. You have to adopt hypothesis-driven experimentation, iterative product releases, and validated learning.

If you aim to improve your software development process, you need to take into account learning, especially when you bring the lean aspect into it. Build vision pivots. While software developers are not a fan of them, they can’t be missing if you want a successful project. In the case of wrong-produced hypotheses, they can be changed immediately.

2. ​​Identify all stakeholders (and involve them in the process)

Every project has multiple stakeholders, and you can’t expect all of them to be participating in every detail of the project. When we say project stakeholders:

  • company leadership
  • end-users
  • customers

Outsourced projects can differ in nature, so sometimes, you can expect stakeholders outside organizations or even individuals that will use or be directly affected by the final product. Let’s see why you have to involve stakeholders in the agile development process:

  • stakeholders can provide valuable expertise regarding processes, historical information, or even industry insight.
  • by engaging your stakeholders, you will reduce risks and uncover them faster
  • early users enable your team to evaluate the project outcomes sooner
  • engaging and involving stakeholders regularly from the beginning will lead to a higher chance of a positive project conclusion

3. Manage project scope, budget, and timeline in each iteration

Scope, budget, and timeline are at the heart of project management. We highly recommended to start agile software development project with:

1. Approximate estimations based on your goals 

You will obtain an initial figure that will represent the total estimated cost for the project. This estimation is built on information from the sponsor regarding the expectations and requirements for the product. Here we have to include target users, purpose, and what issue or problem it is intended to solve.

2. Product discovery workshop 

This event should mark the start of every project. In this event, you have to gather the whole development team, including scrum masters and project owners, and review the business idea and the details of the future product. By doing this, the team can better identify the required work and budget.

The main discussion points in these workshops are:

  • The goal of the product and the business idea behind it
  • User stories
  • The product’s maturity
  • Possible solutions
  • Risks associated with the project
  • Choices regarding technology

The agile approach makes budget management is a shared responsibility. The Product Owner manages the backlog, the sponsor agrees on the budget, and the team delivers the backlog and spends or manages the sprint budget within agreed constraints.

The final step consists of planning a timeline of the stages you will go throughout the project. You have to break down the tasks that must be completed and connect them to your budget and team to obtain an initial estimate of the project timeline.

Even after completing all these steps, you will still be confronted with a high uncertainty level, which is typical for software development. We advise you to allocate extra time to complete the tasks or bring a project manager to guarantee that project progresses fast enough to meet deadlines.

In agile model, the scope, budget, and timeline are under constant pressure from new discoveries from users’ and customers’ feedback. That’s why it’s very important to establish a product discovery team. Rember that your goal is working software!

4. Establish a product discovery team

Proper, ongoing requirements analysis and planning are critical to software development. As a result, changing prediction techniques is difficult because the development process follows the plan to a tee.

Agile software development, on the other hand, necessitates the capacity to make changes quickly. At any point during the development process, changes can be made. This requires you to be always ready to act based on new deliverables and quickly update design and requirements.

This design team needs to be constantly validating project deliverables. The reason for this is simple: in case something goes wrong, they can quickly pinpoint where it went wrong.

Sometimes change is inevitable so this means your team needs to plan a process to manage scope change, so the project doesn’t suffer later. Your project needs a strong foundation to prevent any unplanned changes in project scope, timeline, or budget.

5. Bring Experienced Engineering Leader

Building an engineering team starts with a high-performing leader, who brings in technical capabilities and chooses necessary technology talent to accomplish the work. A strong leader can advise clients, managed remote teams, and protects you from poor team coordination, and quality assurance issues.

Finding the right Engineering Leader with both technology competency and who can advice customer in agile projects can prove to be a real challenge. But you do have the option of hiring somebody with experience in your domain, and with many projects under his belt is essential.

Outsourcing software development services will spare you from doing the effort of searching, interviewing and hiring, and provide you with an ideal team picked according to your needs.

At SoftKraft we are true software partner and we have dedicated development tracks to ensure talent pool for Engineering Leader position. Our Engineering Leaders not only to handle the technology, and team, but also work towards client’s long term success on all levels. For example, they are capable of joining your design team and contributing to the product development process.

2
Jun, 2022

Why every IT Outsourcing business needs quality assurance?

What is Quality Assurance?

Quality assurance (QA) is any systematic process of determining whether a product or service meets specified requirements.

QA establishes and maintains set requirements for developing or manufacturing reliable products. A quality assurance system is meant to increase customer confidence and a company’s credibility, while also improving work processes and efficiency, and it enables a company to better compete with others.

The ISO (International Organization for Standardization) is a driving force behind QA practices and mapping the processes used to implement QA. QA is often paired with the ISO 9000 international standard. Many companies use ISO 9000 to ensure that their quality assurance system is in place and effective.

The concept of QA as a formalized practice started in the manufacturing industry, and it has since spread to most industries, including software development.

7 Reasons Why Quality Assurance Is Important

1. Quality Assurance Saves You Money and Effort

While it takes time at the beginning of the process to create systems that catch errors, it takes more time to fix the errors if they’re allowed to happen or get out of control. Software development is a good example. One analysis showed that fixing an error in the production stage took up to 150 times longer than repairing it earlier in the requirements design stage.

Some businesses might be a bit unsure about quality assurance because of its cost, but the fact is it actually saves money in the long run. Paying to prevent problems is cheaper than paying to fix them. Quality assurance systems also save money on materials because nothing goes to waste. As an example, if a business makes a toy and doesn’t have quality assurance in place, a low-quality toy won’t sell as well or people will complain and return them. The business then needs to make more toys to replace the low-quality ones, which costs them more money.

 

2. Quality Assurance Prevents Corporate Emergencies

With many software companies, the stakes would be high. A simple bug in the corporate software might result in system blackouts, communication breakdowns, or even missing data. So if you are planning to employ software throughout a firm or deal with sensitive info, make sure to implement quality assurance testing and guarantee that there is no room for errors.

 

3. Quality Assurance Boosts Client’s Confidence

By focusing on QA testing, you are sending your clients a message that you want to make their application run smoothly without any errors. This is especially important when you want to create long-term working relationships and improve customer loyalty.

 

4. Quality Assurance Enhances User Experience

It is quite obvious that user experience can be a decisive factor in the success or failure of an IT product. If your software is slow or constantly showing errors, your clients or users might feel annoyed and turn to your competitors’ products. Thus, it is vital to test your product meticulously by experienced employees to ensure that the user will run it smoothly in their daily job or task.

 

5. Quality Assurance Creates More Profit

If you are developing an application to sell or market, then the quality assurance process is one of the most important factors which determine if you can sell it at a higher rate. There is nothing worse than angry users who paid their money for a product that does not work as promoted.

 

6. Quality Assurance Improves Customer Satisfaction

In addition to profits, quality assurance can also improve the satisfaction of your customers, thus enhancing the reputation of the company. Through worth of mouth marketing, a satisfied client will tell their friends or family about your product, which helps your company enlarge the client base without spending too much money on marketing.

 

7. Quality Assurance Promotes Efficiency and Productivity

A faulty software can lead to hurried fixes or frantic communication, which might worsen the situation. Obviously, everybody can work better when they don’t have to deal with constant errors which can be time-consuming and challenging to fix. Being organized with quality assurance testing from the beginning of the project will enable the company to operate smoothly and more productively.

When quality assurance is a priority for a company, it sets the tone for the whole business. The drive for quality infuses every part of an organization and everyone has a role to play. Anything that seems to be inhibiting the organization’s ability to provide quality to their customers is addressed. A work culture focused on meeting certain standards is good for everyone – stakeholders, employees, and the business itself.

2
Jun, 2022

10 huge advantages that make Agile Scrum the most popular working process

What is Scrum?

One of the most popular agile methodologies in use today. Scrum is a lightweight software development methodology that focuses on having small time-boxed sprints of new functionality that are incorporated into an integrated product baseline. Scrum places an emphasis on transparent customer interaction, feedback and adjustments rather than documentation and prediction.

Instead of phases, Scrum projects are broken down into releases and sprints. At the end of each sprint you have a fully functioning system that could be released:

With scrum projects, the requirements for the project do not have to be codified up-front, instead they are prioritized and scheduled for each sprint. The requirements are composed of ‘user stories’ that can be scheduled into a particular release and sprint:

Scrum is often deployed in conjunction with other agile methods such as Extreme Programming (XP) since such methods are in reality mostly complimentary, with XP focusing on the engineering (continuous exploration, continuous integration, test-driven development, etc.) and Scrum focusing more on the project management side (burn-down, fixed scope for sprints/iterations) as part of the product management. So, project managers should choose elements of the Scrum project management methodology and other methods/tools together for the specific project. Since Scrum is a more defined project management methodology in terms of tools and processes, it is often easier to adopt from day one with less initial invention and customization.

 

10 advantages of Agile Scrum Methodology

1. Revenue

Using Scrum, new features are developed incrementally in short Sprints. At the end of each Sprint, a potentially usable Increment of product is available. This enables the product to potentially be released much earlier in the development cycle enabling benefits to be realised earlier than otherwise may have been possible if we waited for the entire product to be “complete” before a release.

2. Quality

Maintaining quality is a key principle of development with Scrum. Testing occurs every Sprint, enabling regular inspection of the working product as it develops. This allows the Scrum Team early visibility of any quality issues and allows them to make adjustments where necessary.

3. Transparency

Scrum encourages active Product Owner and stakeholder involvement throughout the development of a product. Transparency is therefore much higher, both around progress and of the state of the product itself, which in turn helps to ensure that expectations are effectively managed.

4. Risk

Small Increments of working product are made visible to the Product Owner and stakeholders at regular intervals. This helps the Scrum Team to identify risks early and makes it easier to respond to them. The transparency in Scrum helps to ensure that any necessary decisions can be taken at a suitable/earlier time, while it can still make a difference to the outcome. Risks are owned by the Scrum Team and they are regularly reviewed. The risk of a failed initiative is reduced.

5. Flexibility/Agility

In traditional product development, we create big specifications upfront and then tell business owners how expensive it is to change anything, particularly as the project proceeds. We resist changes and use a change control process to keep change to a minimum. This approach often fails as it assumes we can know what we want with 100% clarity at the start of development (which we usually do not) and that no changes will be required that could make the product more valuable (which is unlikely with the speed of change in many organisations and markets today).

In agile development, change is accepted and expected. Often the time scale is fixed and detailed requirements emerge and evolve as the product is developed. For this to work, it is imperative to have an actively involved Product Owner who understands this concept and makes the necessary trade-off decisions, trading existing scope for new scope where it adds greater value.

6. Cost Control

The approach of fixed timescales and evolving requirements enables a fixed budget. The scope of the product and its features are variable, rather than the cost. As we are developing complete slices of functionality we can measure the real cost of development as it proceeds, which will give us a more accurate view of the cost of future development activities.

7. Business Engagement/Customer Satisfaction

The active involvement of a Product Owner, the high transparency of the product and progress and the flexibility to change when change is needed, create much better business engagement and lead to greater customer satisfaction. This is an important benefit that can create more positive and enduring working relationships.

8. A Valuable Product

The ability for requirements to emerge and evolve and the ability to embrace change help ensure the Scrum Team builds the right product which delivers the anticipated value to the customer or user.

It is all too common in more traditional projects to deliver a “successful” project and find that the product is not what was expected, needed or hoped for. In agile development, the emphasis is placed on building the right product that will deliver the desired value and benefits.

9. Speed To Market

Research suggests about 80% of all market leaders were first to market. As well as the higher revenue from incremental delivery, agile development supports the practice of early and regular releases.

10. More Enjoyable

The active involvement, cooperation and collaboration in successful Scrum Teams makes for a more enjoyable place to work. When people enjoy what they do, the quality of their work will be higher and the possibility for innovation will be greater. Happy and motivated people are more efficient, effective and more likely to stick around.

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