Maybe it’s the spring air and the budding trees. Maybe it’s the longer daylight hours.

Most agile product teams have heard the concepts around using a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) to learn about what customers want, Lean Startup style, but the process of defining an MVP to fulfill those goals often proves to be easier said than done. Let it be reiterated that an MVP in software development is not needed when the market and/or user needs are well known, leading to much confusion and dilution of terminology commonality in which the enterprise world has used the term to simply refer to the first release of any product and the inevitable scoping such a release receives.

Want to get the most out of your dev management process?  This article covers some of the best practices and methodologies SitePen uses to accomplish enterprise-level development goals.    We’ll start with some basics on Agile methodology, then we’ll provide practical info about how our experience has culminated in a lean development process that turns ideas into milestones, and ultimately into product outcomes. We focus on instilling best practices throughout the software development lifecycle in all areas of the project to ensure that we not only leave behind a healthy codebase but also the healthy processes and teams to maintain and extend it for years to come.

Today, many software projects rely on some form of iterative software development lifecycle (SDLC) to incrementally deliver features to their users. A feature is identified, analyzed, designed, scoped, implemented, tested, and ultimately shipped to users – and this cycle is repeated for all features throughout a project’s lifetime.

This is part 1 of the Disciplined Engineering series.  It is for teams that want to establish a culture of engineering excellence for their organization. For teams that already have an established process, we recommend reading Part 2: Creating Code Confidence.