MVP Software Development 101: A Complete Guide To Minimum Viable Product

Developing software is not a piece of cake. It’s a lengthy process, which requires effort, funding, and taking risks. The widespread applications or software that we use daily are a product of extended development and a culmination of years of work from developers working in different teams.

Now, it would be rather discouraging if you spent years of time and a reasonable sum of money on developing an innovative idea to find out it doesn’t meet industry standards and expectations. So how do you ensure a new software does what it’s meant to do? Simple! Build a Minimum Viable Product (MVP)!

Before launching their product concept for their target clients, all outstanding software firms, including Amazon, Airbnb, Dropbox, and Facebook, developed an MVP software design. Like them, even you could even start by consulting with the right providers of MVP development services.

This article will cover everything for you to get a basic understanding of MVP software development. It includes its process, benefits, and cost and answers some common questions about MVP software development.

What is MVP Development in Software Industry?

A minimum viable product (MVP) is the first iteration of your product that just comprises the fundamental elements required to address a current issue for your potential clients. MVP software development helps your business in the initial stage to determine and gauge the interest of your target audience. Only subsequent revisions, depending on user input and the evolution of market needs, prompt the introduction of more complicated functionality.

Therefore, MVP software development aids in the gradual rollout of the product, considerably reducing the likelihood of failure while saving time and money. Iteratively constructing, testing and learning allow for incorporating adjustments depending on end-user’s requirements and feedback, guaranteeing that the product fully meets the market’s demands.

The credibility and accomplishment of subsequent iterations depend on MVP’s integrity and success, so it’s important to build it properly, test its functioning, and deliver it on time. The product of MVP Software Development can be a simple mobile application or a basic functioning website. It can be looked at as a test product or an experiment. Let’s look at some benefits that MVP in software development can offer.

Benefits of MVP in Software Development

Save Resources

As its name implies, minimum viable product (MVP) refers to providing with bare minimum of features for functioning. If things go wrong, they may be dealt with by identifying and fixing the underlying causes of the problem. Creating a minimum viable product (MVP) has the primary goal of quickly acquiring as much of the product’s information as possible. MVP software development is an excellent method to learn what features clients are willing to pay for. You get all this by spending just a fraction of the resources needed for a full-fledged launch.

Minimise Risks

There’s always a chance that your brand-new software won’t do well in the market. This danger becomes more significant when much work and money has already been put into development. MVP development process helps determine the feasibility of a concept with little outlay of time and money, hence lowering the probability of failure.

Additionally, as a result of your team’s collaboration with the targeted consumers and the collection of user input, your final product will better suit the requirements of your intended audience. As a result, the risks of a failed product launch are reduced, and the possibilities of a successful launch increase. That is to say, you won’t have to sit back and watch the market reject your product, nor lose clients who have already signed up to utilise your product.

Greater Market Understanding:

The fundamental goal of MVP software development is to identify the appropriate market for the solution offered by a business. If you know your market and what it wants, you can assess whether or not your offering is a good fit.

After developing and offering MVP software design, you can obtain feedback, run surveys, and gather ideas from the first set of consumers. They can assess whether it’s something they might have a use for. In doing so, you can better understand the target demographic and the products or services appropriateness.

Meet the Audience’s Expectations

The success of any software depends on how well the end users perceive it and use it daily. Consequently, it’s crucial to develop a marketable product. With an MVP software design, you can determine early on whether your product will succeed and what it will take to succeed.

End-user feedback collected in the MVP development process provides a chance to establish a happy medium between the product’s features and the wants of its consumers. For this purpose, maximum quality feedback is needed to balance the requirements and the services.

Save Time on Development Later

Including the opinions of the product’s actual end customers and taking immediate action in the MVP software design phase frees up time and money later. It can be put toward other aspects of the company, like advertising or product improvement.

Since you put maximum energy into discovering the issues with your software during the MVP development process, you spare yourself the time to face and solve them later. You will already have a finished product that meets most of your requirements and is ready to market at all times with just some tweaks.

Steps Involved in MVP Development Process

Now that you know the benefits of MVP software development, you must wonder about the process. Here are some common steps involved in the MVP Development process that most professional MVP development companies include:

Step 1: Define the problem

An application without a definite problem is bound to have no use. Clearly defining the issue your software aims to tackle is essential to avoid developing a useless application. At this point, you and members of your partner MVP software development company should meet and talk about the problems that the MVP will address and how it will add value to the lives of the end-users who employ it.

Step 2: Define the audience

Once you have defined the problem, you must ensure it’s used by the designated audience who struggles with it daily. A common pitfall for software developers is assuming that their product must appeal to everyone. While you can make something that millions or perhaps billions of people will utilise, you should focus on a small audience first. Create as detailed a profile of your ideal customer as you can. The buyer persona must include specifics such as:

• Age
• Occupation
• Location
• Socioeconomic class
• Degree of education
• Interests, etc.

This information will help you prioritise which features to release first, leading to the next step.

Step 3: Define the key features.

After identifying the issue and selecting the intended users, the next step is settling on the product’s minimum features that make it usable. The product’s usability relies on several factors. Therefore it’s important to list all the features it may have and then choose the essential ones. The MVP in software development must debut with a subset of these functionalities, including a flagship function for validating the product’s central proposition and the issue it solves.

Step 4: Build an MVP.

After settling on the product’s specifications, the real MVP development process begins. Here, you’ll figure out the development tools, platforms, programming languages, or frameworks you’ll need to get started. Don’t worry about making everything flawless; concentrate on making something people can use. The best way to determine whether your concept has potential and can be implemented is to prototype a working version quickly.

Step 5: Testing the MVP

The next step in the MVP development process after creating a workable product is to put it to the test with real people. For this, you will have to find actual customers that fit your buyer persona well. You need a sizable first set of users to test the product, as they will be the main source of user input.

Getting people to try your MVP software design can be challenging. Use all forms of communication to market it, be it phone, email, in-person, or social media. Maintaining a regular blogging habit and a strong social media presence can create awareness around your product from the get-go.

You can also entice your target audience by setting up paid marketing campaigns on social media platforms. You can set up giveaway challenges, offer gift vouchers, take advantage of influencer marketing, and more. All these efforts are channelled toward trying and testing your minimum viable product and giving feedback.

Step 6: Collect, analyse and apply the feedback.

You must offer a means through which your early-stage testers may submit candid responses for product feedback. This is often done by sending out a survey form via email after a certain time has passed. The goal is to find out what your target audience thinks to determine whether your concept is good or needs some revising.

Based on the results, MVP software development services update and refine the minimum viable product (MVP). Before deciding if you’d like to turn around or keep working on the same concept, you should listen to consumer input on how well the product addresses their needs. If the comments are favourable, you may use them to plan the next round of enhancements to your product.

Early users will likely report too many problems for the MVP software design team to solve immediately. Assess which problems are most detrimental to the product’s average consumer and prioritise fixing them. It’s also possible that this procedure will include the elimination of certain components. You should be open to that.

This is a crucial stage since it enables the development team to refine the product in response to customer comments. Fixing these problems, however, should take as little time as feasible.

Alright, enough theory about MVP software development. Let’s take a look at tools that make the process happen!

 

Tools Needed In MVP Software Development

In the MVP development process, you need a few tools throughout the lifecycle to save time and effort. Below, we have mentioned different phases of software development and popular tools used by most MVP software development services:

Making a Road Map of the Project

Making a road map for developing your software, be it a mobile app or a website, is the most crucial part of MVP software development lifecycle. This includes identifying and documenting all requirements of different phases of the process and how the MVP software design team will implement it. This process can be done with documentation tools, such as Confluence and Notion that makes collaboration and organization easier.

Tool	Confluence	Notion
Open Source	No	No
Cost	Starting at $5 per user	Basic plan starting at $0

 

Choose the software frameworks:

Whether you’re constructing a web or mobile MVP (Minimum Viable Product), as well as the programming language you’re employing and the program’s unique needs all play a role in determining the best software framework to use. Django for web MVP and React Native for mobile MVP are some popular frameworks used by MVP development companies.

Tool	Django	React Native
Open Source	Yes	Yes
Cost	Available for Free	Available for free

 

Managing your project

While working on the MVP software development, you will need to manage and coordinate work between different teams and their members. You may set assignments, assign team members, and keep tabs on their activity with tools like Jira and Asana that assist in planning and management through the MVP development process.

Asana is great for generalized project management, assisting in specifying your project’s process, requirements, and deadlines more precisely. However, Jira addresses the technical demands of software teams and offers the ability and versatility that agile methodologies need to produce value for consumers quicker.

Tool	Asana	Jira
Open Source	No	No
Cost	Basic plan starts at $0	Basic plan starts at $0

 

Writing the code:

Coding is the process of developing computer-readable and -executable instructions. Programming languages provide a standardized set of rules and a standardized vocabulary for expressing computational logic and data structures. MVP development companies use code editors like Notepad++ or Visual Studio Code and a local or cloud-based server to host your project. Some provide everything you need to get started, including tools for testing, deploying, and debugging.

Tool	Notepad++	Visual Studio Code
Open source	Yes	Yes
Cost	Available for Free	Available for Free

 

Managing your code:

For recording each code revision made by the designated developer and its time, version control tools make it possible to monitor and control the evolution of the codebase. This simplifies working with other programmers on the same project and allows for simple reverting to an earlier version if required. Version control systems like Git and Apache Subversion (SVN) are two popular examples.

Tool	Git	SVN
Open Source	Yes	Yes
Cost	Available for Free	Available for Free

Testing the Code

The primary function of testing code is to guarantee that the code used in the MVP software development is error-free and up to standard. Tools like Selenium for websites Kobiton for mobile apps are employed to check that all criteria have been met and that the MVP in software development is error-free. Software development companies may use them for automated testing – including unit and integration tests or manual testing.

Tool	Selenium	Kobiton
Open source	Yes	No
Cost	Available for Free	Starts at $75/ month

 

Deployment of the code

Deployment is the steps taken to release software for usage in a production setting. The process of deploying software is putting code that has been created, tested, and released into a production setting where it can be accessed by users.

Building, testing, and releasing new versions of code are all streamlined with the help of CI/CD technologies, such as Jenkins and Travis CI. This ensures that the code is in a release-ready condition and that any issues are discovered before release.

Tool	Jenkins	Travis CI
Open Source	Yes	No
Cost	Available for Free	Starts at $64/ month

 

Skills Utilised In MVP Software Design

MVP software design team often consists of several sets of skills that come together to create an efficient minimum viable product (MVP). Here are some fundamental skills required to produce an effective MVP in software development, irrespective of whether you’re a solo entrepreneur, have a dedicated MVP software design team, or partner with an MVP software development company.

Project Management

Project management requires keeping the backend and frontend teams on the same page and scheduling to roll out the next features round. Most MVP development companies use Agile methodology in MVP creation because of its flexibility in responding to changing requirements and integrating user input. Agile is an approach to managing projects that emphasizes change, teamwork, and quick iteration. The Agile Manifesto is the foundation for Agile and specifies four essential values:

• People and Communication over Systems and Technology
• The superiority of fully functional software over thorough documentation
• Collaboration with the customer is above contract discussion.
• Preferring improvisation over strict planning.
• Your MVP software development services should be familiar with the Agile process and able to keep up with the sprints to reach the goals.

UI/UX design

The user interface and user experience (UI/UX) is the part that people really use. UI/UX designers perform user research, construct wireframes, outline a user experience path, produce prototypes, and generate graphic components, all while guaranteeing that the layout is both human-centred and in line with the firm’s corporate identity. Someone on your team should be proficient in UI/UX design when you plan on creating an MVP.

Front-end development:

Developers working on the front end make sure that links and buttons take users where they need to go quickly and efficiently. They are also responsible for storing the collected information for later use by the backend developers. In a nutshell, front-end developers make use of UI/UX files and guarantee that the product delivers the promised actions to the users. This is why, front-end development is a skill that someone in the MVP software design team must possess.

Back-end development

Backend development is the heart of MVP software development. Why? Because everything on the front end is dependent on it. To design a website’s back end is to work on the server-side software that handles all of the behind-the-scenes operations of the site or the application.

Website or application performance is monitored and maintained by back-end developers who work on its databases, core business logic, application programming interface (API), architecture, and servers. They use codes that facilitate browser-database interaction, data storage, interpretation, and removal. To smoothen the backend of your program, someone on your team must be proficient with server-side scripting.

How Much MVP Development Cost

The MVP Development Cost can be a huge range. You can better understand the price tag for MVP in software development if you take the time to learn about all the factors involved. Some of the factors that play a part in it are:

• The type and complexity of MVP in software design
• Security considerations
• UI/UX design and the expertise of the designer
• Cost of MVP software development services – be it in-house, outsourced MVP software development company, or freelancers.
• Technology and tools required
• Region of the MVP development process

The MVP development cost may appear overwhelming, but it is important to remember the benefits discussed above and the cost it saves over the lifetime of your product. It definitely costs less to develop a minimum viable product (MVP) and build on it than fund a complete product.

Not everyone may have the financial resources to fund the MVP development process. Often, entrepreneurs obtain financing from an investor or other source for MVP software development. It is crucial to have a precise idea of your MVP budget and how to spend it.

Contact us to get a free quote for your next MVP software design project.

How Anglara Can Help

For each new business’s product concept, the MVP software development model is the best option that saves cost and time over the long term. With MVP in software development, you put your idea to the test and extrapolate the importance and interest in your offering among potential buyers. When developing MVP, a company’s connection with its user base hones the concept into a workable product they may expand upon to provide a revolutionary offering.

An MVP is just the first step in a continuous cycle of bringing and improving your software for the marketplace. However, when it comes to MVP software development, the most important thing is to code, analyse and strategise the development process. This is why it is important to partner with an MVP software development company that clearly understands your concept and the end-users of your product. At Anglara, we’re pleased to walk with you every step of the way as you bring your product concept to life via MVP software development.

With over five years of expertise and several successful website and application deployments, we have assisted numerous businesses in achieving their goals via our MVP software development services. We have a firm grasp on what customers anticipate, so we can build digital products that meet their demands.

Tell us what you want to accomplish in the digital realm, and our team of seasoned programmers, designers, and marketing experts will do all in their power to help you succeed. Contact us to set up a free consultation for your upcoming project today.

FAQs

Q: Why is MVP in software development important?

The most typical cause of startup failure is the development of ineffective software. The intended audience either never uses or never considers certain features. Instead of building a whole product before knowing whether there is a market for it, startups may use minimal viable product (MVP) software development to build a landing page or a prototype. They are able to get all the data and user input they need at a low cost and gain insight into how to best proceed with the project.

Q: How long does it that for MVP software development?

The time it takes to create an MVP in software development depends on various factors, such as the strategy involved, the tech stack to employ, its counterparts in the markets, etc. Due to the need to tailor the final product to your specific company and end-user requirements, developing custom software often takes more time. Consult with one of the experts at Anglara to discuss the scope and details of the project to better understand how much time an MVP software development for your business will take.

Q: What do I need before developing an MVP in software development?

Simply having a concept or a desire to launch a product is not enough to establish a successful company. The first step is to identify your target market and learn whether they have a demand for your product or service. Therefore, it is evident that before moving forward with MVP, you must develop a clear product vision and a list of problems to be solved. Also, it’s crucial to have an intimate understanding of who will be using the product so that you can gauge its potential success.

Q: How much does MVP software development cost?

The cost of MVP software development depends on various factors, including the complexity of the product, security considerations, expertise and tech stack required, etc. With Anglara, you can stay assured that you’ll get the best price for your product. Get in touch with our experts to get a free quote and discuss the road map to change your idea into a reality.