The OSBR Handbook

Appearance

Verify Before Building ​

This is the standard OSBR holds work to when an idea carries real uncertainty before we commit to building it. Where the risk is genuine — will it pay off, is it what the client actually needs, will people use it, can we even build it — we do not find out by building the whole thing. We find out cheaply, first, with a small disposable experiment that actually runs, and we make the result visible to the client.

This standard sits upstream of the Development Guide: its Planning & Shaping stage governs how verified work is built, while this standard decides whether, and in what shape, to build it at all. The evidence it produces is what the Quality Gate later leans on — a decision made on proof rather than opinion. For the investment question — is there a market, will it pay off — verification overlaps with Market Research. We lean on named practices the software industry already trusts — Lean Startup, the XP Spike Solution, Tracer Bullets, Set-Based design, the Design Sprint, and Working-Backwards — and right-size them for an SME and its clients. Deviations are allowed, but — as everywhere in the handbook — they must be deliberate and justified in the project's design notes.

Verification is where OSBR's values meet the client's budget. Be Strong: it takes strength to kill your own idea cheaply, before it costs the client — a demo is not proof, and an opinion is not evidence. Be Nice: the client is always told plainly what is proven and what is still a guess, never sold a settled fact that is really an assumption. Be Kind: spending a client's money on a cheap test before an expensive build protects the people who trust us — we protect the client's budget before we protect our own idea.

How to read this policy ​

  • Requirement levels follow RFC 2119, as elsewhere in the handbook. MUST / MUST NOT are absolute. SHOULD / SHOULD NOT state a strong default overridable only with a documented reason. MAY marks a free choice.
  • Named practice. Where a rule adopts an industry practice, the practice is named inline and cited under References. We adopt the criteria of these practices and right-size them for a small team and its clients — we do not adopt the headcount or ceremony behind their reference setups.

1. Goal ​

Spend the smallest amount of money, time, and code needed to turn an unknown into a known — before the expensive commitment, not after it.

  • Kill bad ideas cheaply. A PoC that fails in three days has saved the client three months. That is a success, not a waste.
  • Learn before we scale. Following the Lean Startup Build–Measure–Learn loop and its idea of validated learning (Ries, The Lean Startup), each experiment must answer a real question with evidence, not opinion.
  • Attack the risk, not the easy part. Do the scary, uncertain thing first. The Riskiest Assumption Test (RAT) (Gothelf) says: find the single assumption that would sink the project if it's wrong, and test that — cheaper and earlier than a full MVP.
  • Keep the client's trust. The client always knows what has been proven and what is still a guess.

2. Responsibility ​

  • Everyone proposing work in a high-uncertainty area is responsible for naming the uncertainty before estimating or building, and for choosing the cheapest experiment that resolves it.
  • The engineer running the experiment is responsible for keeping it small and disposable, and for reporting the honest result — including "it didn't work."
  • The lead / project owner is responsible for the verified-vs-unverified split being visible to the client, and for making the go / no-go / pivot call on the evidence.
  • Nobody is responsible for making an experiment "succeed." An experiment's job is to produce a truthful answer, not a green light. This is the Be Strong duty in practice: the strength to kill your own idea cheaply, before it costs the client.

3. Practices ​

3-1. Verify the four high-uncertainty areas small, first ​

Before full development, uncertainty in any of these areas MUST be reduced with a small experiment that actually runs:

AreaThe questionNamed test
Investment / valueIs this worth doing? Will it pay off?Lean Startup MVP, RAT, Market Research
RequirementsIs this actually what the client / user needs?Working-Backwards PR-FAQ, Design Sprint
ExperienceWill people understand and use it?Design Sprint prototype + test
Technical feasibilityCan we build it? Is the approach sound?XP Spike, Tracer Bullet, walking skeleton
  • You MUST be able to state, in one sentence, which of the four you are de-risking and what result would change the plan.
  • If none of the four is genuinely uncertain, you SHOULD skip the experiment and just build — this policy is for reducing real risk, not for adding ceremony to safe work (§4).

3-2. Make it disposable — PoC, prototype, or in-repo lab ​

The experiment's value is the learning, not the code. The code is expected to be thrown away; the lesson is what survives.

  • Technical-feasibility spikes SHOULD follow the XP Spike Solution (Extreme Programming): a rough, throwaway program written only to answer a technical question, then deleted.
  • To validate an idea end-to-end, prefer a Tracer Bullet (The Pragmatic Programmer) or walking skeleton: a thin but real slice that runs through every layer, proving the pieces connect, then thickened later. A tracer bullet is production-track and evolves; a spike is scaffolding and is binned — know which one you're firing and say so.
  • Experiments MUST NOT be quietly promoted into production. A spike that "works" gets rewritten properly; only a deliberate tracer bullet / walking skeleton is grown. The temptation to "just keep" spike code is how unverified guesses smuggle themselves into production: the spike proved the what, it is not the how.
  • Keep experiments in a clearly marked disposable space — a lab/ or spike/ branch or directory, or a scratch repo — never mixed into the product code as if verified. Labs MAY live in the repository so the learning is not lost, but they MUST be marked as labs, and shortcuts SHOULD be flagged as such (e.g. a // spike: comment) so nobody mistakes scaffolding for a decision.

3-3. Keep options open until evidence closes them ​

When several approaches are plausible and the cost of the wrong bet is high, don't commit to one early.

  • Follow Set-Based / options thinking (from the Lean product development tradition): carry two or three candidate approaches far enough to compare on evidence, and eliminate the losers as data arrives — rather than picking one upfront and discovering its flaws late.
  • This SHOULD be reserved for genuinely high-stakes, hard-to-reverse decisions. For everyday reversible choices, pick one and move — carrying options has a cost too.

3-4. Time-box and write down the question ​

  • Every experiment MUST be time-boxed (hours or a few days) with a written question and a written "what result changes our decision." An open-ended "let's explore" is not an experiment.
  • When it ends, record the answer and the decision it drove — go, no-go, or pivot — even (especially) when the answer is "no." A killed idea with a recorded reason is a deliverable.

3-5. Make verified-vs-unverified visible to the client ​

Transparency to clients is an OSBR commitment, and it applies to certainty as much as to progress. This is the Be Nice and Be Kind rule in one: being honest about what's still a guess, and spending the client's money on a cheap test before an expensive build, is thinking wholeheartedly about the people who trust us.

  • The client MUST always be able to see what has been verified by evidence versus what is still an assumption. Never present an unproven guess as a settled fact.
  • For requirements and scope, you SHOULD use an Amazon-style Working-Backwards PR-FAQ — write the "press release" and FAQ for the finished feature before building — to surface, with the client, what everyone is actually assuming about value and need.
  • Frame experiment results to the client as de-risking: "we spent 2 days to avoid a 2-month bet." A cheaply-killed idea is a win you share, not a failure you hide.
  • Prefer to show the client a working thing over a list of past work. A running slice that proves this idea is stronger evidence than a portfolio of what we built before — the same reasoning the handbook makes explicit in Capability Over Track Record.

4. When this policy does not apply ​

Verification is for reducing real uncertainty. Don't turn it into ritual.

  • Well-understood, low-risk work: just build it. Do not manufacture a "spike" for something the team has done ten times.
  • Reversible decisions: if a wrong choice is cheap to undo, undoing it later can be cheaper than testing it now.
  • The experiment costs as much as the real thing: if the only honest test is building it, build the thinnest real version (a walking skeleton, §3-2) and treat that as the experiment.

References ​

Named industry practices this policy draws on, chosen because they are widely documented and adoptable by a small team.

Validate the idea (investment, requirements, experience)

De-risk the build (technical feasibility)

Related OSBR standards