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Kanban Man!, MMF
The Minimal Marketable Feature (MMF)
03.22.08 | Permalink | 1622 Comments

A Minimal Marketable Feature (MMF) is a feature that is minimal, because if it was any smaller, it would not be marketable. A MMF is marketable, because when it is released as part of a product, people would use (or buy) the feature.

As a counter-example to the MMF approach: While working on an XP team, our team decomposed features into super-small stories. That way the customer (product manager) could pick-and choose from the sub-features to create the big feature. The team would present a list of each sub-feature like a grocery bill — each item has a cost. For example, the customer might decide that pagination (presenting a list of information on multiple pages) just isn’t worth it, because “hey, we only have 25 rows of data right now!”

An MMF is different than a typical User Story in Scrum or Extreme Programming. Where multiple User Stories might be coalesced to form a single marketable feature, MMFs are a little bit bigger. Often, there is a release after each MMF is complete.

An MMF doesn’t decompose down into smaller sub-feature, but it is big enough to launch on its own.

A MMF can be represented as a User Story — a short, one-sentence description.

The format of a user story is:
As a [some user], I want [to do something], so that [I can achieve some goal]

But in contrast to how a User Story is typically used, the team would not break down the User Story into smaller User Stories when using MMFs. Think of it this way: *Gather up all the stories that share the same so that clause — that’s your MMF*.
Kanban Man!, MMF
Kanban: No planning meetings?
03.21.08 | Permalink | 3482 Comments

A team I’m working with has switched from Scrum to Kanban to manage their development efforts. As a result, the team doesn’t have regularly scheduled planning meetings to create a task-driven plan for the upcoming iteration time box.

So does Kanban development have no planning meetings? No! The team self-organizes meetings around a single feature rather than a specific period of time.