The right features

Making Pareto's Law work for you may sound like magic, but there actually is a systematic way of finding out what features you should deliver first. Ask your customers to rank the features they want. You can do this most easily in a group meeting of customers and developers.

　　Write each feature on a Post-itò, put these on a whiteboard, and have the group rank them (1 is high, 10 is low.). Then ask your developers to estimate how difficult each feature will be to implement (1 is easy, 10 is hard) and multiply these two to give you a priority weight for each feature. On the whiteboard, build a matrix like the one I've shown in Figure 3. It will show you, the team and the customers which features you should implement first and which you might postpone. (Quality practitioners will recognize this process as a part of QFD or “Quality Function Deployment.”)

　　Incremental Releases

This whole process of managing features is the best way to stage incremental releases of a software product. Jim McCarthy, Program Manager for Microsoft C++ products, asserts that you can build customer confidence through a series of timely releases, which delivers a steady stream of new features. To do this, he says you have to get into a stable state, and be ready to ship at any time.

　　Here's a strategy for delivering that first release:

　　1. Define your features.
　　2. Prioritize them.
　　3. Define three subsets:
　　· Gotta have
　　· Should have
　　· Nice to have

　　3. Build the ‘gotta have' subset as a prototype. Define a timebox, start prototyping, and deliver what you have when you run out of time. (Since it's a prototype, you won't have trouble explaining why it looks incomplete.)

　　4. Use this early experience with the prototype to define timeboxes for your first incremental release.

　　5. Stay within your timeboxes, delivering the features you have ready, on time.

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