How Much Architecture Is “Enough?”: Balancing the MVP and MVA Helps You Make Better Decisions
Summary
Figure 1: The MVP and its MVA co-evolve in a series of incremental deliveries All this sounds well and good until we start asking fundamental questions like what, really, is "minimum", and how do we know? Hand-selected focus groups can fail to represent the needs of the customer base at large because they have been selected by the people who shaped the concept of the MVP and also suffer from confirmation bias. Put another way, the MVA supports only the outcomes included in the MVP, and it must do so over the expected lifetime of the product, anticipating future needs that should be expressed in the QARs. As a result of this, the MVA hangs in a dynamic balance between solving future problems that may never exist, and letting technical debt pile up to the point where it leads to, metaphorically, architectural bankruptcy. Coming back to the "roped climbers" metaphor, if the MVP is successful it also may sow the seeds for its downfall because it often creates a lot of technical debt that needs to be repaid in a hurry if the product is going to be viable in the long run.