My brain attic

Start Simple Iterate Quickly

Posted on Aug 26, 2021

Today, I want to come with an advice to those of you that have an idea. An idea that could become a project that itself could become your job.

My advice is very simple but powerfull : “Start simple and iterate quickly”.

To illustrate this idea, let’s say you want to create a new kind of ticketing system. How to start simple ?

  • Do you need an authentication to your system ? No. Authentication is both very common and a huge time taker. This is not the place you will get your distinctive advantage.
  • Do you need email notifications ? No. Sending email suppose that some people read them. No users, no one to read the emails !

What you need is the bare minimum (a minimum viable product) to make it work (and sell ?) and then planify next iterations that will features at a rapid pace.

Let’s planify a roadmap together.

The MVP (minimum viable product)

An MVP should show a good understanding of the business at hand together with the core features of your tool.

Thus there are the bare features I would put in the MVP of a ticketing system :

  • A correctly implemented domain model that only contains the notion of Ticket;
    • A ticket have a title
    • A ticket have a description
    • A ticket have a publication date
    • A ticket have a status that can be : Submitted, Running and Done
    • When the ticket is done, an end date is set on it
  • A comprehensive set of tests on this domain model
  • Some persistance mechanism
  • A way to expose features via an API (REST or GRPC)
    • Create a ticket
    • List tickets
    • Change a ticket status

Taking your time to create this, this should take about a day to complete. It is fast. It gets you started on the project. It proves that the idea is doable. And then you can immediately ask/get feedback from some kind of users (even if it is only technical ones). And really it is all what a ticketing system is. Other features are just decorations !

Next iterations (one or two weeks each)

Each iteration should follow the same steps as the MVP. In fact each iteration should be the MVP of a subset of features of the application.

  • Add the notion of comment on the ticket. No nested comments or fancy reactions, just plain text with no author at all.
  • Add the notion of categories of tickets.
  • Add the notion of Author and Support users.
  • Add authentication
  • Add email notifications
  • …

For each iteration, implement the bare minimum features. If it works, you WILL get back to it later to add what’s missing and at that time you will have :

  1. Way more understanding of what is a really important about this feature
  2. A clear understanding tha tyou have time to iterate on this feature as your project is going to good way !