How to build your MVP?SONAL MANE

STARTUP TECHNOLOGIST – MICROSOFT

FOUNDER INSTITUTE – PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT SESSION

Why do we build products?

Delight customers with inspiring solutions

Solve a real problem and help people

Realize a big vision and change the world

Get a strong fan base and lots of revenue

Product development approach

Build a great product with lots of features Time wasted in building something nobody wants

OR

Build for fast releases and get customer feedback Time wasted in getting the right customer requirements

MVP is

NOT The final version of the product

An experiment to validate the hypothesis

Usually discarded to build the real product

A minimalist user interface

Ok to share and receive feedback

Minimal Viable Product The minimum set of

features needed to learn from early adopters Avoid features no one will

use

Maximize the learning per dollar spent

Minimal Viable Product

Product needs to solve a real problem Early adopters can bridge the

gap with missing features

Can be developed incrementally

Requires a commitment to iteration

Simple landing page screenshots from your Value Prop Call to action graphic designer

Web page titlehttp://www.url.com

“Register/Sign-up”

MVP Dissected

Lean Startup & Extreme Programming

User Stories

Similar to use cases but, not the same

Used to build time estimates

Track what customers need the system to do

Drive the creation of acceptance test cases

Each story will get 1,2 or 3 weeks ideal development time

Focus on user needs and not technology

User Stories

The project velocity (or just velocity) is a measure of how much work is getting done on your project.

To measure the project velocity you simply add up the estimates of the user stories that were finished during the iteration.

Architectural Spike

Figure out answers to tough technical or design problems

A simple program to explore potential solutions

Expect this to be throw-away code

Reduce the risk of the problem

Release Planning

Approx. 60 – 100 user stories are sufficient to make a release plan

A release planning meeting is used to create a release plan

The goal of the release planning meeting is to estimate user stories in ideal programming weeks

Customers prioritize stories with developers via user story cards

Planning may be done by time or scope

Project may be quantified by four variables; scope, resources, time, and quality

Release Planning

Iteration

Iteration

Iterative Development adds agility to the development process.

Divide your development schedule into about a dozen iterations of 1 to 3 weeks in length.

One week is the best choice even though it seems very short.

Have an iteration planning meeting at the beginning of each iteration to plan out what will be done. 

 If it looks like you will not finish all of your tasks then call another iteration planning meeting, re-estimate,  and  remove  some   of  the   tasks.

Acceptance Tests

Acceptance tests are created from user stories

Customers are responsible for verifying the correctness of the acceptance tests and reviewing test scores to decide which failed tests are of highest priority

A user story is not considered complete until it has passed its acceptance tests

Quality assurance (QA) is an essential part of the XP process

Acceptance Tests

Acceptance tests should be automated so they can be run often

 A bug in production requires an acceptance test be written to guard against it. 

Given a failed acceptance test, developers then create unit tests to show the defect from a more source code specific point of view.

When the unit tests run at 100% then the failing acceptance test can be run again to validate the bug is fixed.

Testing Techniques

Smoke test via landing pages

SEM - $5 a day via Facebook etc.

In product split testing

Paper prototypes

Customer validation

Removing features

Mturk, Adwords

Small Releases

The development team needs to release iterative versions of the system to the customers often. 

At the end of every iteration you will have tested, working, production ready software to demonstrate to your customers

This is critical to getting valuable feedback in time to have an impact on the system's development

User Stories

Release Plan

PrototypeAcceptance tests & Bugs

MVP

Deliverables

Tools & Resources

MVP

Backend• Cloud• Database

Services/Middle tier

Frontend• User interface

Resources

User Stories Download Team Foundation Server

Workflow items and workflow

Visual Studio 2012 Guide

Measuring velocity in VSFS

Power Mockup

Release Planning Create a project plan in five steps

Planning using Project 2013

Scrum process template

Acceptance Tests Tracking software quality

Bug Tracking using Visual Studio - Test Manager

Resources

Azure Portal

Windows 8 Store App Sample Code

BizSpark Site

List of products available through BizSpark