Adrian Smith presented at the July 2010 Agile Academy Meetup in Brisbane on the topic of Agile for Startups. Here are my notes:

• startups should not last forever – transitional to success or failure
• need an idea or an idea where you can do better (copycat business)
• 90% of startups fail due to lack of customers
• good people are critical to success – technology is a lever to productivity, no more than in software development
• “The best programmers are up to 25 times better than the worst programmers” (Robert L. Glass)
• startup lifecycle – building customers vs building product
• aim for high quality code to reduce technical debt – will allow you to react faster
• 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

Some of the tools that support agile startups:

• Skype – fantastic for collaboration, desktop sharing
• Yammer – effective to create internal collaboration within company, to share ideas, etc.
• Teleport – great for screen sharing, especially dual screens
• iChat for screen sharing
• Harvest for time tracking (low cost)
• Saasu (Australian), is like a better hosted MYOB, free for 20 transactions or less a month, payroll and BAS at the press of a button
• Pivotal Tracker for project management and Scrum, other tools around like Scrum Pad
• Unfuddle for ticketing, version control with GitHub
• Balsamiq for mockups, iPlotz has better functionality (low cost)
• CodeYak is in beta for code metrics and tracking over time
• Hudson for continuous integration, Pivotal Labs has a free dashboard (Pivotal Pulse)
• Heroku for deployment with a pure Git workflow, Linode for hosting
• GetSatisfaction for customer feedback, rating features, etc…
• Google Analytics for tracking web site traffic, Trendly for more meaningful interpretation
• Startup Search is a good place to see if somebody has else has done something you’re interested in
• Resources – The Four Steps To Epiphany by Steven G. Blank (free) and Getting Real from 37 Signals (free online)

Question and answer session:

• showcase in a startup – get deployed to deployment environment and get customers using it, using new features as they come along
• virtual office that make you seem big – a cost that you don’t need to spend, especially if using your own money
• key agile – setting consistent expectations in relation to code quality amongst all developers, need a minimum viable product to showcase
• collaborate closely with customers, have people on-site with customers who are using it, Skype calls to customers using the product
• starting with agile – determine your priority and make those tasks transparent, make sure you are working on priorities and to an agreed quality
• regret some features that were initially put in that were thought to be useful (make features work hard to get into the product initially)
• biggest obstacle is getting to a minimum viable product, risk that product is not usable or is superseded by another product