What does a product sponsor expect from a software product development team? He/She expects the team to deliver the following throughout the development lifecycle:

• Working software
• Technical excellence
• Frequent releases to customer
• Adaptability to change
• Continuous improvement
• Reduced time and cost

How can the team achieve the above goals? There are many tools and processes like agile, lean, continuous integration tools, deployment tools etc. But even with the usage of these tools product sponsors are still running into major quality issues, cost deviation, software which is not production ready, delay in releases etc.

Aspire has faced similar challenges and questions from its ISV clients and came up with an approach to address the product development challenges in more efficient way. The solution is called Producteering™ which is an approach to build better products and it consists of Principles, Practices, People, Platform and Innovation.

Principles: The Producteering™ principles constitute a set of product development rules that need to be adhered to, throughout the product development lifecycle. Some of the Producteering™ Principles are delivering on-time & within budget/scope, Minimal Viable Product, collaborative development with customers to eliminate waste, process to focus on technical excellence and good design, agile , continuous delivery and working software, continuous improvement for operations efficiency.

Practices: Practices describe on how the implementation is practiced in different phases of the product development lifecycle ranging from requirements definition to release and maintenance phases. Aspire has defined and practicing the best practices in following areas: requirement engineering, architectural standards, performance engineering and refactoring, UX engineering, testing, continuous integration, DevOps etc.

Platform: Budget, time and cost is key for product development sponsors and end customers, so we need to have good platform on which the product is built and also consider some platforms which can accelerate development and save time & effort. We have a technology management platform ‘Propel’ for controlling the quality of product and it saves 30% of the development time; also an engineering management platform ‘Prism’ to manage requirement to releases and support..

People: It requires the right team to develop a right Product. If you build the product with just one or two resources performing different roles of a product development team it will lead to a product which is not of high quality. Aspire talent pool has wide range of resources (BA, UX specialist, Architects and so on) to choose from.

Innovation: Innovation is the key to a product as we need to continuously bring in differentiation and improvement of different elements of the product or the product development lifecycle. Innovation needs to be implemented at a strategic level, form and factor, platform, technology and process.

Stay tuned to the next blog which provides details on different principles, practices and platforms to help build better products