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New product

Problem/Context

In a replacement project or enhancement project where the business is regularly creating new products.

Solution

Develop enough features in the new system to support a new product. Add a gateway that directs customers of the new product to the new system. This pattern can be used together with the Synchronized database or Replicated database patterns in order to make base data available to the new system.

Strengths

  • Greatly reduced MRP if the business is willing to keep the new product simple to start with.
  • Migration of some types of data is postponed and possibly reduced since the new system can operate more or less independently of the old system.

Weaknesses

  • If there are strong interdependencies between the new product and existing products it will be difficult to achieve a real reduction in MRP with this pattern.
  • The business must be willing to launch at least one new product as soon as possible after the release.
  • There will probably be some base data that must be migrated. This pattern does not work if it is difficult to isolate what data to migrate.

Examples

  • This pattern was evaluated in the Book club system. New book clubs would have been started in the new system.
  • Writely, now Google Docs, released their first version after four weeks. Instead of implementing all the features that were essential for a word processor, they implemented only what people miss with the existing offering. Specifically, sharing, availability on the web and versioning.
  • The evolution of the programming language Java is constrained by current large user base. The Scala programming language is positioning itself to become a Java 2.0. Whether it will succeed is still not clear.