Benefits of Hypothesis-Driven Development
Hypothesis-driven development promotes a structured approach to agile delivery, enabling teams to test assumptions early and make data-informed decisions. This leads to more efficient and effective outcomes. Other benefits include:
Focus and Clarity
Hypotheses help Scrum Teams move from vague ideas and assumptions to clear, testable statements. This structure is crucial in managing the complexity of product development, where many variables are at play. By articulating hypotheses, Scrum Teams can focus their efforts on specific aspects of the problem. Clarity allows teams to design precise experiments and avoid delivering untested assumptions.
Risk Reduction
Investing in features, products, or initiatives based on assumptions without validation is risky and often leads to a company wasting money, especially in product development. A hypothesis-driven approach forces a team to navigate that risk by testing assumptions before they start delivering a solution as well as continuously when they are developing a solution. This process of validation helps to identify which ideas are worth pursuing and which should be abandoned.
By testing their hypotheses early, Scrum Teams can save money and avoid the costly mistake of building things that users do not want or need. This is also important in situations and markets where time and other factors are limited.
Data-Informed Decisions
A hypothesis-driven approach encourages Scrum Teams to base decisions on data rather than intuition and/or bias. When a hypothesis is tested through experimentation, it generates empirical data that either supports or refutes an initial assumption. This approach leads to more informed decision-making and reduces reliance on guesswork.
Learning and Experimentation
The foundation of an experiment is a hypothesis which creates a process for testing, learning, and adaptation. Experimentation drives curiosity and allows Scrum Teams to learn quickly from user interactions with their product. Whether a hypothesis is proven true or false, the results provide valuable feedback. If a hypothesis is validated, a team can move forward in the direction they intended. If it is invalidated, a team gains insights that can lead to pivot or refinement of their product strategy.
Innovation
To innovate, an effective Scrum Team must explore new ideas iteratively and systematically. By testing a hypothesis, Scrum Teams can validate new ideas in a controlled manner. This encourages continuous learning, innovations and discovery.
Resources:
Books:
- E. Ries. The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses. Crown Publishing, 2011
- J. Gothelf and J. Seiden, Lean UX: Designing Great Products with Agile Teams, 3rd ed. Sebastopol, CA: O'Reilly Media, 2021
- M. Cagan, Inspired: How to Create Products Customers Love, 2nd ed. Hoboken, NJ, USA: Wiley, 2017