Minimalistic development

25-minute Talk

All levels

Timetable

2:45 p.m.-3:30 p.m.

Wednesday 15th

Room

Room F2 - Track 2: Talks

Audience

Testers, product owners, scrum masters and developers

Key-Learning

- What things can be decomplefixied

- The importance of gathering feedback from production

- The importance of production data for feedback

- Approaches for working with developers to practise this

testing hypotheses by shipping and observing

How to adapt a mindset of minimalistic thinking for your projects

“Simplicity - the art of maximizing the amount of work not done - is essential”. This is one of the principles of the agile manifesto that tends to get overlooked. In this talk, we’d like to tell you the story of what happened when we went for the most minimal solution we could think of, shipped it and got feedback from users, user behaviour and data from the system itself.

Our story: Tim and Alex wanted to solve the problem of not having enough parking spaces for the company. We had a hypothesis that people with a space would be willing to share it. But how to test this hypothesis using software with the least effort possible?

Join us on the journey of:

• Identifying the hypothesis

• Strict decomplexification and removing anything not necessary

• Coding and deploying within 6 hours

• And the chaos, fun and learning that ensued! We think this talk is useful for anyone in an agile project – and specifically for testers.

We are interested in shortening feedback loops but are often risk-averse when it comes to deploying (especially with few tests!).

This talk touches on when the best time is to introduce tests in a fast-paced experiment, and on how observability doesn’t just help us with errors, but also to understand our users and even drive features. We’ll also look at how pairing between testers and developers can be a great asset to the minimalistic mindset.

In this talk, we’ll take you through our approach, and give you the story of our applications and the feedback we got from them. We’ll also discuss what is transferable to other project work and give you tips for trying it out in your own teams.