Skip to main content

Agile Entrepreneurs, Part 3 of 3: Agile Software Development

The Agile entrepreneur has a choice all too common these days.

Implement it yourself. Or hire smart people for equity only- easier to do in the Silicon Valley than anywhere else (it's amazing what a single ad in Craigslist can do). Or pay young, super-smart programmers in India for a fraction of your monthly salary- you may not be able to afford it for a whole year, but we're talking about 3 weeks (i.e. iterations) here at a time.

Regardless of the approach, practically every software entrepreneur in the US now has the ability to incrementally implement the features defined by the customer(s) , one iteration at a time. And get valuable feedback. And sooner or later, you'll have a paying customer as long as you stay true to the principles of Agile- "The Customer Is Always Right At The Beginning Of Each Iteration" (apologies to Sam Walton and Kent Beck:).

Alternately, the customer(s) might realize soon enough and declare that the product doesn't have as much value for them as they initially thought - and led the entrepreneur to believe. That is, either they won't buy or the price is not worth the effort for the entrepreneur.

No big deal. The entrepreneurial itch has been scratched, definitively, affordably. He can move on to better things in life, like, umm ... another product?

Software entrepreneurs no longer have to choose either risking getting burnt in order to find out whether their idea has merit or living for the rest of their lives wondering what if.

For more tips for Agile Entrepreneurs, go to www.AgileEntrepreneurs.com

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Splitting User Stories vs. Rally's "split" feature (that has nothing to do with it!)

Agile tool Rally has a "split" feature it recommends to handle "unfinished work" in a Scrum Sprint: Manage Unfinished Work - Split user stories ( new link ) Below are my observations on the "Split" feature in Rally (followed by a few excellent articles on Splitting User Stories):   This "split" feature in Rally has numerous problems: 1. Nothing to do with Splitting User Stories It has nothing to do with "Splitting a User Story" which is an advanced but fairly well-understood field in Agile, and a tool for Product Managers to use in one of the two scenarios: The Product Manager does it before an Iteration commences (i.e. during backlog creation or release planning) to create User Stories by business value that are right-sized, i.e. they can be comfortably implemented inside an iteration; The Product Manager does it in Iteration Planning or in the middle of an Iteration to reduce scope by removing/simplifying accept

Entrepreneur Committee - Advisory Board of SVASE

For whatever it is worth, I would like to announce to my millions of would-be readers that I have been invited to join the Entrepreneur Committee on the Board of Advisors to the Silicon Valley Association of Startup Entrepreneurs . And I have accepted. If you're a hi-tech entrepreneur, I would love to hear your suggestions on what I can do in my "official" capacity to make SVASE a better organization for startups.

Test Trimming: A Fable about Testing

While browsing the web randomly, I found this very cool article on the value of testing. Says the author, Gerald M. Weinberg: "Throughout my career, I've watched in dismay as one software manager after another falls into the trap of achieving delivery schedules by trimming tests. Some managers shortcut test work by skipping reviewing and unit testing in the middle of their project. Others pressure the testers to "test faster" at the end. And, most frequently, they just drop planned tests altogether, hoping they "get lucky." I've written several essays about the dangers of test trimming, but nobody seems to understand, so I asked myself, "What am I doing wrong?" Perhaps I wasn't practicing what I was preaching. Perhaps I was trimming tests myself. Perhaps my writing needed more testing! So, I wrote a story about taking shortcuts and read it to my granddaughter, Camille."