Minimum marketable feature
Software by numbers Chapter 1 “Software Development After Dot Com” 중.
MMF?
MMFs are units of software value creation. They represent components of intrinsic marketable value. …
What is particularly unique about software products is that the features are often, or even usually, separately deliverable. In other words, a complex software application can have value to a user even if it is incomplete. Indeed, it is often claimed that software is by its very nature always incomplete! …
Typically an MMF creates market value in one or more of the following ways:
- Competitive differentiation
- Revenue generation
- Cost saving
- Brand projection
- Enhanced loyalty
Clearly, not all software features are MMFs. For example, referring again to the hypothetical banking application mentioned earlier, a facility to resize the display screen is not an MMF, since it does not meet any of the criteria listed above.
This means that if software is to be built to optimize value creation, it’s important to identify and select MMFs very carefully. —p5-6, Software by numbers Chapter 1 “Software Development After Dot Com” 중.
Selection and ordering:
MMF selection and ordering is one of the most important steps in the business of software development. …
- If units of marketable value exist within a software application, the value creation process needs to recognize and articulate them.
- Seeing software development as the assembly of units of value creation allows for funding to be made more granular and more closely aligned to iterative delivery. This gives rise to the concepts of iterative funding, defined more fully in a later section.
- If MMFs can be identified and quantified, it is possible to define mechanisms for optimal value creation per unit time and thereby drive the iterative software development process from financial considerations. One possible optimization is to order the creation of MMFs so as to create the maximum value as early as possible.
- By careful ordering of MMFs, we may be able to generate mini-ROIs that align with and complement more granular funding. This means a software development project can be ordered in terms of its MMFs, so it becomes self-funding - an optimal but not necessarily always achievable state. —p7, Software by numbers Chapter 1 “Software Development After Dot Com” 중.