Hypothesis Engineering for Innovative Projects In an increasingly turbulent business environment represented by the Internet era, software development has to be more flexible and agile, both in large companies and startups. Continuous experimentation becomes an important alternative paradigm of software development. It is an alternative to execution-oriented approach where software development is only fulfilling a list of defined requirements. To be effectively experimentation-driven, a very first step is for all stakeholders involved in software development to move from a requirement, feature-driven mindset to hypothesis thinking. This new way of thinking is focused on taking product assumptions as hypotheses that should be tested and developing experiments to test these assumptions, before creating the final software product. In this talk, we will introduce the concept of hypothesis engineering, and present a set of industry practices and techniques to foster hypothesis thinking and handle hypotheses.

1. Stop talking requirements,
start thinking hypotheses
Jorge Melegati and Xiaofeng Wang
Free University of Bozen-Bolzano

2. How do you describe what to develop?

3. Maybe you use a
conventional requirements
specification document.
Example: RUP template

4. If you adopt Agile, you
are probably using User
stories.

5. What do these methods have in common?
• They describe, in different levels, the features the software system
should have
• Using them, the development team could code the solution

6. How do you define your requirements?
• Probably talking to your customers
• Often based on your understanding

7. But what to do when the product is
innovative?
• Novel products
• Novel features for a product

8. You can make experiments!

9. But how to describe experiments?
• The goal is not to develop the final solution
• It is to answer with confidence something
• Requirements are probably not the answer!

10. Let’s think about hypotheses!
A hypothesis is an explicit statement that has not been proved yet but
could be tested through an experiment.

11. Hypotheses: some examples
• The blue color button brings better results than the red button.
• Library A is faster than library B to perform determined task.

12. Hypotheses: some examples
• Two main hypotheses
• Travelers would be willing to stay
at a stranger’s house.
• Hosts would be willing to receive
strange people in their own house.

13. Hypotheses are interesting! So what?
Hypotheses

14. Hypotheses are interesting! So what?
Types
Hypotheses are from different types!
Examples:
• Problem
• Features
• Customer
Hypotheses

15. Hypotheses are interesting! So what?
Types
Qualities
Hypotheses have qualities:
Examples:
• Falsifiable
• Specific
Hypotheses

16. Hypotheses are interesting! So what?
Types
Qualities
Elicitation
HypothesesWhat are our hypotheses?

17. Hypotheses are interesting! So what?
Types
Qualities
Elicitation
HypothesesSpecification
How to write the hypotheses down?
Example: templates
We believe that [users] want [a
feature].

18. Hypotheses are interesting! So what?
Types
Qualities
Elicitation
HypothesesSpecification
Prioritization
Which hypothesis should we
experiment with first?
Example:
matrix impact X probability of
being wrong

19. Hypotheses are interesting! So what?
Types
Qualities
Elicitation
HypothesesSpecification
Prioritization
Analysis
Management

20. Thank you!