How a Three-Person Software Firm Uses Lean Inception and Shared Toolkits to Stay Efficient

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A software engineering postgraduate student at PUC-RJ shares workflow lessons learned while running Devtype, a small three-person development company. The team adopted Jira for project management and began using Excalidraw for system architecture diagrams, but found that rushing into design without first gathering requirements was counterproductive. The author now advocates for lean inception sessions — structured conversations to define customer needs, tasks, and deadlines — before any technical diagramming begins. Reaching a minimum viable product (MVP) quickly is emphasized as the key milestone that turns ideas into reality. The team also built reusable backend toolkits covering database connections, AWS integration, authentication, and more, which improved consistency and maintainability across projects.

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ProgrammingDEV Community ·

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ProgrammingDEV Community ·

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