ThoughtWorks is offering a series of webinars on Continuous Delivery

Most enterprise software development has evolved to a place where releases are infrequent and occur long after features were first conceived. The day of release is a nail-biting affair for which we assemble swat teams and stand ready to scramble and fix the inevitable problems.

This has enormous impact on the businesses that we work for, making us vulnerable to nimble competitors. We are forced to predict (guess) what customers want rather than relying on real user feedback, we can't react to market changes or explore new business ideas quickly, and we end up not building the right thing for our users or at least investing too much money in something where a lighter solution would have sufficed.

It doesn't have to be this way.

Webinar #7
Understanding the MVP - Connecting Continuous Delivery to the Lean Startup Movement

The minimum? Why would I only want to do the minimum? It seems counter-intuitive - the idea that the best path forward when embarking on new product development should focus on the smallest possible product. Why not go big and try to launch with a big splash? Won't your customers be turned off by a lack of features and glorious complexity?

As it turns out, taking the path of humility towards your market is a far more productive path. You can start with a small hypothesis and test that hypothesis against real customers. Using continuous delivery, you can rapidly iterate over your product, using data, rather than opinion, to guide your product development efforts. Such an approach not only costs less money, it allows you to vet the initiative before it becomes "too big to fail".

In this webinar, we will cover what the Minimum Viable Product is, how you define one, and how you use validated learning to guide your efforts. Further, we will cover how agile software development and continuous delivery are essential to product development efforts that use this approach.

About the speaker

Aaron Erickson is a technology writer, software developer, and consultant at ThoughtWorks. His life’s work is helping convert the best human capital into results for companies that empower both the knowledge workers who produce software, and the people in the companies whom we serve

He frequently speaks at events such as TechEd, VSLive, and .NET user groups – with a goal of furthering the exchange of ideas – be they technology contributions – or observations about the technology consulting business.