Hypothesis Driven Development

Value-driven business transformation with hypothesis-driven development

Arun Ramakani
2 min readJun 2, 2021

Why Hypothesis Driven Development?

Organizations are forced to react to a couple of critical challenges that evolved during the last decade

  • With more and more people connected digitally, most of the new business models are digitally powered.
  • The high volume and velocity of changes in the business landscape make the software requirement itself agile. These landscape changes are fueled by the explosion of start-up ecosystems, new digital capabilities, and strong competition in the globalized era.

Influenced by these changes, organizations are looking for a software development model that can help them achieve the below objectives

  1. Innovate in the middle of continuous change
  2. Take changes to the market in a short time and experiment with end-users
  3. Identify/adopt a relevant new digital business model and digital capabilities early
  4. Avoid potential big bad investment from early adoptions

These objectives can be achieved by Hypothesis Driven Development.

What is Hypothesis Driven Development?

It’s a model where we can experiment with a small piece of our hypothesis on a new business idea or a digital capability quickly to get early feedback. This is achieved by the well-known agile construct called vertical slicing, where the requirement is broken into multiple small pieces and experimented iteratively.

Here we delay the decision by initially investing small and learn from the feedback. Finally, a decision is taken based on the realized value. We could make one of the below decisions a) invest more b) drop the idea 3) altering the idea. We call this a value-driven business transformation. This model can enable us to innovate and early adopt with no big bad investments. In other words, we could cross the chasm with ease.

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Arun Ramakani

#ContinuousDevOps #Kubernetes #Microservices #CloudNativeApps #DevOps #Agile