When I was a high school student I was an avid competitor in the sport of wrestling.  It’s an extremely demanding and punishing sport: requiring extreme stamina, strength, skill, agility, and mental toughness.  You have to have a strong mind to compete successfully in wrestling.  When you’re in the 3rd period of a match, you’re exhausted, and your opponent continues aggressively to push the action, only the tough-minded continue to fight and pull out a win.

Preparation for competition is key and demanding.  Practices are lengthy, exhausting, painful, and mentally draining.  It is common for a wrestler to lose anywhere from 3 to 10 pounds of body weight in a single practice.  Preparation requires discipline to keep with a training and weight loss program.  The diet can drain an athlete mentally having to refrain from the daily temptations of satisfying treats.

At times even the best competitors hate the sport, yet they push themselves to endure the challenge for they know to be the best requires intense preparation.  There are no shortcuts to success, not even natural talent.  Elite wrestlers would never allow their coach to run anything less than a demanding practice.  They seek out coaches who will push them to their limits.

The software community can learn much about dedication and commitment to excellence from wrestlers.  A wrestler would never tolerate shortchanging the “Big Upfront” work required for success as we do in the practice of software development — no matter how painful and difficult the upfront work.   Instead of arguing for dedication to the “Big Upfront” work, proponents of Agile practices argue against it.

Just as in wrestling, it’s been my experience that a commitment to the “Big Upfront” practices makes for highly successful software projects.  “Big Upfront” has become an anathema in the software community dedicated to mediocrity, chaos, and low quality.  Because it is difficult, it is often neglected. 

We often forget that we are paid to do a job, and it requires us to do what’s required, not just what we like to do.   Having some talent and in demand skills does not give us any special privileges, though people often behave as it does.  Eventually, the issues making the “Big Upfront” work challenging come to haunt you in the project when skipped.  There is no escaping it; it’s only postponed.

Like the wrestler preparing for competition, we need to embrace the challenges in the “Big Upfront” work required to deliver successfully on a project even though it may be painful.   When a wrestler fails in his quest, he’ll often rightfully blame a lack of sufficient preparation, but when a software team fails, they often fail to see the inadequate preparation as a factor.

A commitment to excellence requires no less than a complete commitment to doing what must be done in spite of all the pain and obstacles.  If achieving excellence were easy, it wouldn’t be so uncommon.  The irony is that embracing the “Big Upfront” work actually makes the project easier – not harder.  Elite athletes know and accept this truth.  It’s about time the software community does too.  Only when we do, can we begin to advance the practices of managing software development.