Minimum Viable Product

I got an opportunity recently working on an MVP, EPiServer Commerce project where we have to install commerce on existing sites and provides a MVP Commerce site. It was a bit challenging and interesting experience and a lot of learning for me that I will like to share with you champs.

Define what the minimum means for your project:
What minimum Means?
e.g. Creating a product that focuses on a minimal feature set and have minimal scope
What minimum does not mean?
e.g. Operating in a sloppy or undisciplined way, building bad code that’s going to result in a lot of technical debt or compromising on quality.

Client's Demand:
It is important to scope the client demands and bringing them in the Agile. Try to avoid the wrong assumptions as soon as possible where wrong assumption means that does not fit well within the time frame or has been assumed without prior knowledge.

Scope Business requirements.
Expectation of the MVP should be clearly defined to all stake holders

Study existing system
Existing Infrastructure should be studied and how it will change by introducing MVP, It should not be ignored to avoid last minute failures.

Select 'A' Team but,
It is important that 'A' team has been assembled, and they are highly skilled in their respective areas with abilities to deliver the results in difficult situations But don't give them the warrants to wear a certain cocky attitude with tendency to break the rules.

Don't Skimp on Quality
MVP is not about asking people to ignore their skills, values and gut instincts about quality; it’s about making sure that they don’t waste their time and talent over-designing features that are not actually important to the customer. You will still make sure that you are delivering a reliable product.

Development environments.
Consider how much time non development time will require e.g. setting up development machines, team-city, octopus etc.

Select the Right starter site for your MVP
Consider all options closely that what they are offering and what business demands are. In case of some existing sites this can be more complex to select not only the right product but also right version also that can come under the definition of MVP.

We have few commerce starter sites that can be used to start project depending on the business requirements

EPiServer Commerce Sample Site
commerce75.demo.episerver.com/
based on ASP.Net Webforms.
Available for version 7.5.9342

OXXAS
https://github.com/OXXAS/CommerceStarterKit
based on ASP.Net MVC.
Commerce 8.11.3
CMS 8.5.0

Quick Silver
https://github.com/episerver/Quicksilver
based on ASP.Net MVC.
Commerce 9.2.1
CMS 9.1.0