Agile Development vs. Publishing Too Early

Question

Hello, where do you guys draw the line between being agile and publishing early (with a limited feature set) and publishing too early (not meaning buggy)?

I am thinking that if you publish too early, potential users may simply get turned away thinking that your product is just some half-baked thing thrown on the market that can't compete with other finished software and will never return. But then again, 'agile' development is designed at its very core to have iteration and publishing cycles as quickly as possible.

Where do you draw the line? Am I wrong that I keep wanting to delay publishing products until I feel they are extremely worthy of a user's time? Am I missing out on marketing, growth or other opportunities because I don't release early?

I'd be very interested in your opinions on this topic. Thank you!

Answer 1

"Publishing" in (my understanding of) the agile sense doesn't necessarily mean "publishing to market". "Agile" primarily focuses on the project management, usually for one-off developments and not for mass-market software. Even when developing for the mass-market, publishing early (within your company) helps because you can avoid late integration problems and start usability testing early.

Answer 2

I don't draw the line, the product owner has that responsibility. I'm in the group building the product but I'm not the one to determine what is the minimum feature set to release into the wild. The half-baked idea has merit in that if the stakeholders don't understand "Agile" then they may not like the results as the whole point is to try to put in what they want in an orderly manner. On the other hand, if they do understand the point of "Agile" then they will give feedback that can be used to determine where the focus should be, fixing bugs, polishing the application, or implementing features/enhancements.