The smell of delivery
It’s no wonder that I’ve been quite silent on the blogging front lately. I’ve been busy delivering a project before Christmas and yesterday, we made it.
It’s quite weird to deliver on the day like this: we set the date before starting and it sometimes felt quite strange: I’ve worked so long with agile values that this seemed like breaking so many rules. But the fixed date kept us focused and everyone aware of the need for prioritization.
So, yesterday the D-Day was finally there and we were all a bit spooked. Would this work? And it actually did. We have now updated a large and key area of the site without any major defects identified so far.
How does it feel? We’re of course proud of making it. But most of all; I’m proud of the team work. When performing the retrospective today; the happy feeling persisted and this is based on the work everyone put in making this a successful project. Of course there are stuff that I could have been happier about have I/we done it differently, but when is not that true? But most importantly; we’ve gone through this stronger and happier. And hopefully our customers will have a smoother experience finding inspiration and their next holiday.
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Personally, I’m a very big fan of non-negotiable deadlines. It doesn’t matter if you run your project agile or classic, but such a deadline helps to prevent any discussions about shifting the release.
When we developed ARIS Express, we put the release date to 09/09/09, because it was a good marketing thing. We announced the release date already publically in March of the same year and put even up a public webpage with a counter counting back till the release date. You can imagine it was impossible for development management to get any shift of the release date. At the end, we made the release on time, but of course we had to disable 1 or 2 features, which were not stable enough. We published an update some weeks later adding those features, but also fixing bugs the users already discovered.