You Want IT When?

When I review the articles published to this site over the last quarter, there is a dominate theme for the quarter.   The theme deals with the mistaken trade-offs of delivering products faster.  Our culture has become increasingly impetuous.  Many buy homes without saving for down payments.  Many lease to drive cars that would be, otherwise, too expensive to purchase outright.  The investment community has become increasingly speculative where promising high risk investments are outrageously favored over modestly priced companies with strong balance sheets, good earnings, and promising but modest growth rates.  Parents purchase new vehicles for their high school children instead of teaching the lessons of working and saving to get what they desire. Executives destroy the balance sheets of great companies to satisfy Wall Streets expectations for quarterly earnings.  Political candidates maliciously and falsely tarnish the character of their opponent rather than invest in the hard work to make the case for their policies and leadership.  In software, many start coding before completing sufficient analysis and design, and many accept requirements change without fully analyzing the impacts. Society increasingly mobilizes to satisfy its desires and needs quickly; however, satiating too quickly comes with grave consequences as we are seeing in our economy today.

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You’ve probably heard someone say it, or you may even say it yourself:  “You design quality into a product; you don’t test quality into a product.”  The last time when I heard those words uttered, I had to restrain myself from reacting.  What did this person mean by that?   The product was in trouble.  It released late and with low quality.  Customers were rolled back to the former version, and now the product marketing team fears that if things aren’t corrected soon they will lose market share.

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I often wonder why software teams always seem to be committing to unrealistic schedules.  You know when the sales team signed a contract with a customer to deliver functionality on a date without ever asking the engineering team whether it were possible. Never mind the roadmaps identify an entirely different set of functionality than what was committed. And guess what?  The product roadmaps can’t change either; the sales team has signed contracts on that functionality too.

It’s not just the sales organizations though; the software organizations are all too happy to over commit without any help from outsiders.  You probably have one of those programmers on your team that when you ask him for an estimate, he says a week and three months later he’s still working on it.  When you ask him what happened, his answer is well it was a bit more complicated than I thought.  Does he learn from it? No way. Ask for an estimate on the next project, and he’ll still quote a week.

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