The most dangerous date in a release is the one that is artificial but told to the team is legit. The fastest way for your team to lose trust in you is to parlay in Danger Dates that have no meaning, no belief, no honesty and no reality. It’s the surest way to ruin all the good work you have undertaken up to that point.
Call it your worldview or framework, but what they really are, are your Internal Variables. The criteria that define what you, when you do it. They are your MAX_ACTION where you top out listening to someone complain about the same issue for the umpteenth time before moving on. They are your CURRENT_ATTEMPT where you are willing to keep doing something the old way before you realize there has to be a better way. They are…
Have you ever ridden on the old Turnip truck going up the hill? The truck can’t make it up the hill, so they start throwing turnips off the truck in the hope that they will make it up the hill with a lighter load. All that effort to pick the turnips, wash them, sort them and put them in the box has now been thrown from the truck. Sound familiar? The last leg of the…
If you come into work the next day and cannot read the code you read you wrote the night before. It’s time for a rewrite. If you are debugging and lost in the call stack. It’s time for a rewrite. If the slightest tinge of fear runs up your spine when someone mentions that library. It’s time for a rewrite. It’s not a complicated equation, what is complicated is the amount of work we sometimes…
When you’ve been unclear on when the delivery date is? When everyone is working day and night to finish the task but is so far off? When you haven’t been asking for updates and assume it’s going to be done when you were hoping it would be done? When there are two weeks left and QA has not started? The answer: None of these times, it should have been done months ago, when you were…