Over the past decade, software development has gone through many phases. From making processes agile and efficient to simplifying IT services with DevOps, MVP is one of the many advances that has had a fundamental impact on the software development process. This article delves into how and how MVP works in software development.
What is the MVP
MVP, Minimum Viable Product, is a software development method developed by Eric Ries in The Lean Startup. Simply put, the development team gets user feedback by providing a minimum viable product, and iterates rapidly on that minimum viable product until the product reaches a relatively stable stage. It involves the basic framework of a pre-development project and uses a minimum of functionality and use cases to reduce costs ahead of time, identify defects in the design, and reduce time to market.
Why use MVP development?
Software development in its raw form is a flawed process, where developers once spent a lot of time and money, only to discover errors and problems. Thus, MVP development helps identify the primary target user needs in advance, finalize the technology stack and functionality, and determine the value proposition. Especially for organizations with strict budget guidelines, the focus should be on developing a meaningful list of features using the simplest technology stack.
The following steps are critical to identifying features and prioritizing them.
Measuring market demand
Check to see if there is a supply gap in the functionality your software offers in the marketplace. Demand for a product can be based on consumer feedback that meets consumers’ exact expectations. To determine requirements, we need to analyze our competitors and their existing products in the market.
Identify product limitations
Through development, product limitations help stakeholders prepare for future problems and implement appropriate planning and alternatives. All of these limitations create market opportunities that lead to effective agile development and differentiation that differentiates existing products in the market.
Think outside the box
The following steps will get you closer to your ultimate goal: scope the project for advanced feature sets and use ideas, list the functional and non-functional features of the application, and then prototype the idea
Complete the technology stack
The technology stack consists of a collection of tools and technologies that can be deployed to create and publish products. These stacks contain third parties, libraries, modules, packages, and engineering tools that are compatible with the programming language of your choice. The stack must also meet the need to deliver the business value that the interested parties expect.
Design prototype drawing
A front-end technology stack and framework that provides developers with the ability to use completed components faster than the deployment of custom solutions for applications. These elements can be linked to the main back-end algorithm of the idea, resulting in a measurable MVP. This can be further matched with requirements, the right customers, and customer feedback.
Therefore, you must develop an initial roadmap and create a risk register with the appropriate enterprise application development service providers.
The essence of an MVP is to experiment, and each MVP helps answer a question about a given hypothesis. The reason why MVP should be designed as cheaply as possible is that the essence of MVP is to do experiments, trial and error, rather than to manufacture the final product. Therefore, existing products or human services should be used as much as possible to replace product development and reduce the cost of trial and error as much as possible. This is in line with the “small steps, quick iterations” of agile development, and the relationship between the two can be summed up in one sentence: agile development is knowing the “direction” to validate the “method”, while the minimum viable product is knowing the “method” to validate the “direction”.