Check out Shuba’s notes from Eric Ries recent talk at MIT.
How to build a lean start-up:
- Continuous deployment.
- Tell a good change from a bad change quickly
- Revert a bad change quickly
- Work in small batches (at IMVU, large batch = 3 days worth of work)
- Break large projects down into small batches
- Have a cluster immune system
- Run tests locally. Everyone gets a complete sandbox
- Continuous integration server – tests to ensure all features that worked before still works
- Incremental deploy – reject changes that move metrics out of bounds
- Alerting and predictive monitoring – wake somebody up if metric goes out of bounds. Use historical trends to predict acceptable bounds.
- Conduct rapid split tests: A/B testing is key to validating hypotheses
- Follow the AAAs of metrics: actionable, accessible and auditable