Agile for Startups with Dr Adrian Smith

Adrian Smith, a software engineering and technology consultant who specialises in Agile and Lean methods and is also an Agile startup entrepreneur, shared his experiences, advice and learnings at the recent July Agile Academy Meetup in Brisbane on the topic of Agile for Startups. 

As Adrian pointed out start-up businesses face a unique set of challenges particularly the adoption of Agile but the case for using Agile methods (like pair programming) is compelling, especially given the very real constraints on time and resources.  While any new business has its risks Adrian felt that there were three key elements that you need for a startup to eventually becoming a successful business.  These included:

• Start with a good idea.  (But it doesn’t have to be new.  A common mistake people make.  A good idea will always be a good idea but you just need to add value to it that customers will want.)
• Have good people.  (Have good people on your team in your business, as this is critical to the success to failure of a startup. You all have strengths and you should draw on them, not try to take on every role.)
• Customers.  (Common sense but 90% of startups fail through lack of customers)

Other tidbits of wisdom Adrian shared included -

• Startups should not last forever – they should transitions to success or failure after a reasonable period of time.
• An office is sometimes seen as an expression of rank, whereas the office in an agile team/startup should enable innovation.
• Use cloud based infrastructure to scale up and down and not be tied to any one location, also good for remote workers.
• Startups cannot support the same number of roles as a typical agile team, need to dual-role and work out priority.
• Startups can choose the technology, and that choice can govern the types of people that you can attract.

Also just like the Agile Manifesto, Adrian runs his business based on his own variation of a Startup Manifesto:

Useful software over comprehensive business plan
Customer revenue over external funding
Validated customer learning over following a plan
Building it well over building it to sell.

Of course, startups can't run on philosophy alone, so Adrian also provided a comprehensive list of tools (mostly free) his startup uses or recommends in his presentation below.  For links to these tools as well as to the questions asked on the night one of our members, Craig Smith has included these in his blog from the night as well. 
 Agile for Startups