Forming an idea for a new piece of software is energizing. Brainstorming possibilities and envisioning potential inspires team members to create something new that solves a problem. Ideation is exciting, but without putting your idea through its paces, you may not end up with the product you expect.Is the idea practical? Is it feasible? Will the users actually want to use it? What resources will be required to build it? These and other questions can all be answered with a proof of concept.

The Proof Of Concept

Proof of concept (PoC) is creating evidence and documentation about the feasibility of an idea. It outlines how the idealized product or service would become market-ready, how it would function, if it’s needed, and who is the target demographic. When it comes to software development, it applies to a specific process. For software-specific ideas, a PoC is an act of determining if the software can be built in the real world, what technologies should be used in development, and whether the software is likely to be adopted by its intended users.

Defining A POC

In creating a proof of concept, you are essentially laying out on paper why your idea would be successful in the market. Think of it as a business plan for a software idea. Though the inclination to skip making a POC can be tempting, it’s important to fully flush out your idea for a few reasons.

Importance Of POC

<ul>
<li>Validity- Before you skip to development, it’s crucial to know if your idea is feasible. </li>
<li>Focus Group Testing- Taking a proof of concept and testing it with your potential user base will help you get early feedback on what people actually want.</li>
<li>Money generation- Creating an early roadmap that predicts market value, possible sticky points, and how to monetize your software idea will make a strong statement in creating investor confidence in your product.</li>
</ul>

POC: The Reasons For Implementing The Step

Although nearly everyone who comes up with an idea is convinced it will work, creating a proof of concept to test your idea will ensure you arrive at the best version of it and will save you time and money in the process. Laying out every detail about your idea will help highlight gaps in your product plan that you might not realize exist. Whether you’re adding new features onto an existing software or whether you’re building something new completely from scratch, a proof of concept will ensure that you take the fastest, most direct route to success.

The Need Of POC

Proof of concept always comes first. Think of this like a word document, where you have written down a fully formulated idea.﻿A prototype is the first, very basic iteration of your software idea. It takes the words from the proof of concept and brings them to life in a tangible product.

Difference Between Proof of Concept and Prototype

Creating a Minimal Viable Product (MVP) is the next step that comes after you have a prototype. This is the simplest, most stripped-back version of your software idea, yet it still retains enough features to be released to the general public for actual use. 
Minimal Viable Products are a common topic in software development with a lot of content surrounding them, so you may want to learn more about the pros and cons of creating an MVP.

Minimal Viable Product (MVP)

There is not a cut-and-dry method for writing a proof of concept. The rules aren’t strict like they are for other written documents, like research papers, which must all follow the same outline of intro, methods, and conclusion. Instead, it’s important to make sure specific key topics are covered, however that may be. A proof of concept is a living document that can be updated as you have new thoughts and get fresh feedback from people who read it

How to Write a Proof of Concept 

It only makes sense to put time and money into building a product if people need it. Maybe those people are the company’s employees, who need to improve their productivity. Maybe they’re a new market the company isn’t currently serving but could easily reach. Whoever they are, you need to know that your software will meet their needs.

Step 1: Prove the Need

This step involves brainstorming ways to solve each of the pain points you identified in the first step. There will likely be several ways to solve each issue. After your brainstorm, you’ll evaluate each possible solution to determine how it stacks up in reference to cost, competition, timeline, technology challenges, etc. When this process is completed, you should have a clearer idea of which solutions to include in the final product.

Step 2: Map Pain Points to Solutions and Get Feedback

Your next step is to create a prototype that wraps your solutions into a rudimentary product that you can use to test with those you interviewed previously. This prototype should have the expected feature set and UI/UX.Once the prototype is built, test it with your interviewees for additional feedback. Record their use of the product to track how intuitive the interface is, and find out if you overlooked any important functionality.

Step 3: Prototype Your Solution and Test

An MVP is different from a prototype in that it’s a fully-functional solution that you can put out into the world for use. While it will include only the most-important features that are essential for solving the primary pain points you identified, it should function on the user’s side just like the final product.

Step 4: Create a Minimum Viable Product

From all of the information you’ve gathered in each of the previous steps, create a roadmap that describes what you’ve learned and outlines a recommended step-by-step process for building the product. Think of this roadmap as a set of blueprints for constructing a building. With this roadmap as a guide, everyone will be kept on the same page through product development and will have a clear picture of what the end goal is.

Step 5: Design a Roadmap

The more information you know about what your users actually want, the sooner you can focus on those features, cut unnecessary ones, and save yourself iteration time and expenses along the way. You can continue to fundraise at each point, using these supporting documents to show investors the product’s progress. Many startups fail because they skip over a proof of concept, convinced their idea is a unicorn, and rush to go straight to market. Taking some thoughtful time on a PoC is a great first step to getting you on the way to a rewarding market launch.

Key Takeaways

Creating a proof of concept is the first step in testing your software idea and ensuring successful software development.

Stashed ideas

5 Steps to a Proof of Concept for Successful Software Development - Designli Blog

The key to getting business people and developers to work well together, and building a world-class engineering culture, is for the business people to share problems, not solutions, with the developers. 
So bringing developers into the big issues you're trying to solve and leveraging their full skills.

Why Developers Matter

<ul>
<li>Great product managers are not a layer between customer needs and developers. They actually remove layers, eliminate preconceived solutions and erroneous presumptions, and streamline communications.</li>
<li>Great product managers facilitate the understanding of customer problems, not only for developers but for all people involved in building the product or feature.</li>
<li>Good ideas can come at any time, from anywhere, not necessarily when management requires it.</li>
</ul>

Removing Layers, Not Adding More

<ul><li>Off-the-shelf software is for general purposes and does not give an edge over your competitors. </li><li>Businesses need to become more software orientated to gain that edge. You need to build your own software or die.</li><li>To stay on top of competitors, you need to innovate. To innovate, you need to experiment. Experimentation is the prerequisite to innovation.</li><li>You need to ensure that there's tolerance for failure - both personally and organizationally - it's the primary key to unlocking innovation.</li></ul>

Innovation At Hyperspeed

An open learning environment is where the company is receptive to not having all the answers, is comfortable with uncertainty, and strives to get better every day.It means being flexible instead of rigid and having a culture where people continually seek the truth. You want knowledge and truth to win, not politics.

An Open, Learning Environment

Ask your developers what happens after an outage. <ul><li>Is the person to blame or the process?</li><li>Are people encouraged to learn quickly, even at the risk of making mistakes?</li><li>Do you provide venues for learning from each other and even take risks by giving younger leaders the reins to parts of the business?</li></ul>

The Aftermath

A company's structure built on teams of around ten people is a way to scale up a company without losing the urgency, focus and quality of talent that characterises a startup by building a large company out of what are essentially many startups.<ul><li>"Single-threaded" leaders have only one thing on their mind - how their team can win.</li><li>They are empowered to make their own decisions and be responsible for them.</li></ul>

Small Teams

Make sure your customer feel you're on their side. Encourage developers to talk directly with customers, listen on a call or attend a meeting with customers regularly to get a human connection with the customer and understand their problems better.Ask your developers what customer problems are they solving/working on?

Wearing The Customer's Shoes

The core of Agile is the ability to move quickly and easily, change direction quickly and respond to changing inputs.A Product Manager or leader needs to question the following: <ul><li>Ask your developers whether they want product managers to be gatekeepers or facilitators of customer interaction? Do PMs view their role similarly?</li><li>Do they collaborate to groom road maps coming from a shared customer understanding, or do they divide and conquer where PMs know the customers and engineers know the code?</li></ul>

An Agile Environment

Jeff Lawson, software developer turned CEO of Twilio, creates a new playbook for unleashing the full potential of software developers in any organization, showing how to help management utilize this coveted and valuable workforce to enable growth, solve a wide range of business problems and drive digital transformation. From banking and retail to insurance and finance, every industry is turning digital, and every company needs the best software to win the hearts and minds of customers. The landscape has shifted from the classic build vs. buy question, to one of build vs. die. Companies have to get this right to survive. But how do they make this transition? Software developers are sought after, highly paid, and desperately needed to compete in the modern, digital economy. Yet most companies treat them like digital factory workers without really understanding how to unleash their full potential. Lawson argues that developers are the creative workforce who can solve major business problems and create hit products for customers—not just grind through rote tasks. From Google and Amazon, to one-person online software companies—companies that bring software developers in as partners are winning. Lawson shows how leaders who build industry changing software products consistently do three things well. First, they understand why software developers matter more than ever. Second, they understand developers and know how to motivate them. And third, they invest in their developers' success. As a software developer and public company CEO, Lawson uses his unique position to bridge the language and tools executives use with the unique culture of high performing, creative software developers. Ask Your Developer is a toolkit to help business leaders, product managers, technical leaders, software developers, and executives achieve their common goal—building great digital products and experiences. How to compete in the digital economy? In short: Ask Your Developer.

Ask Your Developer

<ul>
<li>Inspiration: Thinking big ideas and imagining what might be possible</li>
<li>Collaboration: Working together well with other people.</li>
<li>Craft: Applying skill to achieve high-quality results and always striving to do better.</li>
<li>Diligence: Doing the necessary grunt work and never resorting to shortcuts or half measures.</li>
<li>Decisiveness: Making tough choices and refusing to delay or procrastinate.</li>
<li>Taste: Developing a refined sense of judgment and finding the balance that produces a pleasing and integrated whole.</li>
<li>Empathy: Trying to see the world from other people’s perspectives.</li>
</ul>

The Seven Essential Elements Of The Apple Development 
Approach

In any complex effort, communicating a well-articulated vision for what you’re trying to do is the starting point for figuring out how to do it. And though coming up with such a vision is difficult, it’s unquestionably more difficult to complete the entire circuit, to come up with an idea, a plan to realize the idea, and then actualize the plan at a high standard, all without getting bogged down, changing direction entirely, or failing outright.

A Well Articulated Design Vision

Taste is developing a refined sense of judgment and finding the balance that produces a gratifying and integrated whole. The small-scale justifications must contribute to a scheme larger than themselves. The design responsibility expands to balancing the many individual refined-like responses against the other side of the taste equation, the attempt to create a pleasing and integrated whole.

The Value Of Good Taste In Holistic Design

Persist too long in making choices without justifying them, and an entire creative effort might wander aimlessly. The results might be the sum of wishy-washy half decisions. Developing the judgment to avoid this pitfall centers on the refined-like response, evaluating in an active way and finding the self-confidence to form opinions with your heart and head.
It’s not always easy to come to grips with objects or ideas and think about them until it’s possible to express why you like them or not, yet taking part in a healthy and productive creative process requires such reflective engagement.

Killing The Creative Effort

The appearance of a product should tell you what it is and how to use it. Objects should explain themselves.

When developing Safari, the Apple team quickly ran into speed and performance issues. Steve mandated that the browser be fast, so one member of the team (Don) directed that they implement a set of automated tests that would launch the browser and have it load a bunch of web pages in succession and report back a speed. Ken wrote the code for it and soon they had their “Page Load Test” (PLT) benchmark, which enabled their development process to ensure the product became “faster by never getting slower”.

Apple Stories: Safari

To make great work, one requires a combination of people and commitment. Creative selection and the seven essential elements were our most important product development ingredients, but it took committed people to breathe life into these concepts and transform them into a culture. The culture we created is inseparable from the products we created. In my experience, this manner of culture formation works best when the groups and teams remain small, when the interpersonal interactions are habitual and rich rather than occasional and fleeting.

A Committed Team

Ken Kocienda is a software engineer who, among other things, worked on “Project Purple”: Apple’s codename for the original iPhone. Ken writes about the process behind software creation at Apple—which he dubs "creative selection"—and how he thinks that process was a significant driver in how Apple came up with its world-class products.

* WALL STREET JOURNAL BESTSELLER * An insider's account of Apple's creative process during the golden years of Steve Jobs. Hundreds of millions of people use Apple products every day; several thousand work on Apple's campus in Cupertino, California; but only a handful sit at the drawing board. Creative Selection recounts the life of one of the few who worked behind the scenes, a highly-respected software engineer who worked in the final years of the Steve Jobs era—the Golden Age of Apple. Ken Kocienda offers an inside look at Apple’s creative process. For fifteen years, he was on the ground floor of the company as a specialist, directly responsible for experimenting with novel user interface concepts and writing powerful, easy-to-use software for products including the iPhone, the iPad, and the Safari web browser. His stories explain the symbiotic relationship between software and product development for those who have never dreamed of programming a computer, and reveal what it was like to work on the cutting edge of technology at one of the world's most admired companies. Kocienda shares moments of struggle and success, crisis and collaboration, illuminating each with lessons learned over his Apple career. He introduces the essential elements of innovation—inspiration, collaboration, craft, diligence, decisiveness, taste, and empathy—and uses these as a lens through which to understand productive work culture. An insider's tale of creativity and innovation at Apple, Creative Selection shows readers how a small group of people developed an evolutionary design model, and how they used this methodology to make groundbreaking and intuitive software which countless millions use every day.

Creative Selection

The 2021 DevOps RoadMap is the image attached to this idea, check it out!In the RoadMap we will find the step by step of how to become a DevOps guru in 2021 through learning the listed essential skills.

The 2021 DevOps RoadMap for Developers

The three main programming languages are: Java, Python, and JavaScript. I strongly suggest that you learn at least one of the three major general purpose programming languages.

1. Learn a Programming Language

DevOps now requires developers to know about OS and hardware. You also need to know about process management, threads and Concurrency, Sockets, I/O Management, Virtualization, memory storage and file systems as suggested in roadmap.

2. Understand different OS concepts

For a DevOps, it's important to have good command in the command line. Knowing some Linux shell like Bash or Ksh and tools like find, grep, awk, sed, lsof, and networking commands like nslookup and netstat is mandatory.

3. Learn to Live in terminal

Gone are the days of isolation, in today’s world, everything is connected to everything which makes networking and security very important.In order to become a good DevOps engineer, you must know about basic networking and security concepts like DNS, OSI Model, <a href="https://javarevisited.blogspot.com/2013/07/how-ssl-https-and-certificates-works-in-java-web-application.html">HTTP</a>, HTTPS, FTP, SSL, TLS, etc.

4. Networking and Security

As a DevOps champion, you should know what is set up in your machine and how you can set that up, only that you can think about automating it.In general, a DevOps engineer should know how to set up a Web Server like IIS, <a href="https://javarevisited.blogspot.com/2017/01/12-essential-apache-web-server-interview-questions-answers-java-linux.html">Apache</a>, and <a href="https://javarevisited.blogspot.com/2018/07/how-to-setup-jndi-database-connection-pool-tomcat-spring-example-tutorial.html">Tomcat</a>.He should also know about Caching Server, Load balancer, Reverse Proxy, and Firewall, etc.

5. What is and how to setup

This is probably the most important thing for a DevOps engineer and this is a very vast area as well.As a DevOps engineer, you should know about containers like <a href="https://javarevisited.blogspot.com/2018/02/10-free-docker-container-courses-for-Java-Developers.html">Docker</a> and <a href="https://javarevisited.blogspot.com/2018/09/10-devops-courses-for-experienced-java-developers.html">Kubernetes</a>, Configuration management tools like <a href="http://bit.ly/2ygZXa3">Ansible</a>, <a href="http://bit.ly/2CRTh2x">Chef</a>, <a href="http://bit.ly/2xZiAjM">Salt</a>, and <a href="http://bit.ly/2yc6O4D">Puppet</a>, Infrastructure Provisionings like Terraform and Cloud formation.

6. Learn Infrastructure as code

This is another very important thing for DevOps gurus and champion, i.e. to set up a pipeline for continuous integration and delivery. There are a lot of tools in the CI/CD area e.g. <a href="http://www.java67.com/2018/02/6-free-maven-and-jenkins-online-courses-for-java-developers.html">Jenkins</a>, TeamCity, Drone etc. I strongly recommend learning at least Jenkins, as it’s the most widely used and probably the most mature CI/CD tool in the market.

7. Learn some Continuous Integration and Delivery (CI/CD) tools

Apart from setup and deployment, monitoring is another important aspect of DevOps and that’s why it’s important for a DevOps engineer to learn about Infrastructure and application monitoring. There are a lot of tools in this space e.g. Nagios, Icing, <a href="https://www.datadoghq.com/">Datadog</a>, Zabbix, Monit, AppDynanic, New Relic etc.You can choose some of them depending on which one is used in your company like AppDynamic and Nagios.

8. Learn to monitor software and infrastructure

Cloud is the next big thing and sooner or later you have to move your application to the cloud, hence it’s important for a DevOps engineer to at least know about some of the popular Cloud Providers and their basics. While <a href="http://www.java67.com/2018/05/top-5-amazon-web-services-or-aws-courses-to-learn-online.html">AWS </a>is clearly the leader in the cloud it’s not alone, <a href="https://javarevisited.blogspot.com/2019/07/top-5-google-cloud-platform-gcp-courses-certifications-online.html">Google Cloud</a> and <a href="https://javarevisited.blogspot.com/2019/07/top-5-courses-to-crack-azure-architecture-technologies-certification-az-300-exam.html">Azure</a> are slowly catching up and then we have some other players like Heroku, Cloud Foundry, and Digital Ocean.

9. Learn about Cloud Provides

DevOps is really hot at the moment and most of my friends, colleagues, and senior developers I know are working hard to become a DevOps engineer and project themselves as DevOps champion in their…

The 2021 DevOps RoadMap

Idiomatic refers to the most common way to write something in a language. Writing idiomatic code means following the conventions of the language, and solving problems the way they are meant to be solved in that language, not by porting programming patterns from other languages.Idioms vary widely across languages.

Idiomatic code

Learning and internalizing the idioms of a language greatly improves your reading abilities. You are able to focus on understanding what the code does instead of wondering why the code is written in an awkward way.Projects that use idiomatic code benefit from:<ul><li>Higher maintainability - Idiomatic code is clear, maintainable, and bug-free</li><li>Faster code reading & Lower cognitive load - People are no longer stopping at every line, trying to figure out what it does, while struggling to keep in mind what came before</li><li>Faster debugging - It's easier to spot bugs in idiomatic code</li></ul>

Benefits of idiomatic code

Writing idiomatic code implies relying on the standard library to solve problems, and not reimplementing functionality that is already maintained by core developers.This has two main benefits:<ol><li>Others will find it easier to read and maintain your code because you use packages familiar to them</li><li>You save time by not having to implement functionality from scratch</li></ol>

5 Steps to a Proof of Concept for Successful Software Development - Designli Blog

Ask Your Developer

Creative Selection

The 2021 DevOps RoadMap

Write Idiomatic Code

It's time to

READ

LIKE

A PRO!