This document provides guidance on software management practices for tech startups. It recommends using small sprints for validated learning, maintaining a lean backlog focused on the minimum viable product, trunk-based development, unit testing to reduce bugs and costs, testing features on production through techniques like A/B testing, continuous delivery to get changes to production quickly, and an evolutionary architecture designed for incremental change. The overall message is that startups need agile practices that provide fast feedback to validate ideas and rapidly adapt to uncertainty.

1. Software Management for Tech Startups

2. About Me
● Mahmoud Atef Abdelsamie.
● Worked @IBM for 9 Years as
Software Engineer.
● CTO, Co-founder and the Technical
Product Manager of flowngoo.com for
3 years.
● A hardcore developer, passionate
about Technologies, Agile & Software
Architecture.

3. Agenda
● Traits of startup.
● Small sprints (Validated Learning).
● Lean backlog (MVP).
● Trunk-based development.
● Trust your tests.
● Test on production.
● Continuous Delivery / Deployment
● Evolutionary Architecture

4. Traits of startup (Lean Startup)
● “A human institution designed to create a
new product or service under conditions of
extreme uncertainty”.
● Entrepreneurs Are Everywhere.
● Entrepreneurship Is Management.
● Validated Learning.
● Build-measure-learn.

5. Small Sprints (Validated Learning)
● Little’s Law: Cycle Time = Work in Progress (WIP) / Throughput
● Decide the shortest to get Validated Learning. (Design Sprint ?!)
● Fast feedback, give a team more opportunities to improve.
● Create pressure, increases the performance of the team.
● Less interruptions
● Consistent team pace.
● Small failures.

6. Lean backlog (MVP)
● Backlogs should answer a single question: ‘What’s next?’
● Backlogs should target the Minimum Viable/Sellable Product.
● Big backlogs reduce productivity.
● Good Backlog Should Be:
○ Small: about 100 items are sufficient for future planning
○ Structured: Epic -> Story -> Task
○ Just In time : stories in the next sprint are ready (detailed, designed, no blockers)
○ User Centric: each story provides end-to-end user value.

7. Trunk-based Development
● All commits go to the trunk/master branch.
● When release is decided a new branch is created for the release.
● If there is fix needed, it will be committed to master, then cherry-picked to the
release branch.

8. Trust your tests (unit tests)
● Keeps you out of the debugger!
● Reduces bugs in new features and
in existing features.
● Reduces the cost of change.
● Improves design.
● Encourages refactoring.
● Forces you to slow down and think.
● Speeds up development by
eliminating waste.

9. Test On Production
● Sandbox accounts: Test the services without
taking real effect. Or taking a temp effect for short
time.
● Dark launch: Double user requests on the old and
new versions to test the effect of the changes.
● Canary releases: To small set of users.
● Blue-Green release: Roll out changes gradually.
● A/B testing: To get fast feedback from user
groups.
● Feature flags: To decouple feature rollout from
code deployment.

10. Continuous Delivery / Deployment
● Get changes into production safely and quickly.
● Make deployments predictable, routine affairs that
can be performed on demand.
● High quality, low risk, low time to market, fast
feedback, happy team.

11. Evolutionary Architecture
● An evolutionary architecture designs for incremental change in an
architecture as a first principle.
● Organized Around Business Capabilities (Bounded Context).
● Modularity and Coupling (Microservices).
● Experimentation (A/B testing, canary releases .. etc).

12. References
● http://www.agileadvice.com/2014/06/12/howtoapplyagile/21-tips-on-choosing-
a-sprint-length/
● https://trunkbaseddevelopment.com
● https://continuousdelivery.com/
● https://featureflags.io/
● https://medium.com/@copyconstruct/testing-in-production-the-safe-way-
18ca102d0ef1
● https://www.belatrixsf.com/blog/an-introduction-to-testing-in-production/
● https://www.thoughtworks.com/insights/blog/microservices-evolutionary-
architecture