This had beta be good, etc.
Thursday, February 28th, 2008So we’re just two days shy of March 1st - our target date for launching the product for beta testing (insert pun of choice using the word beta here). And using the immortal refrain of backseat drivers and children everywhere:
“Are we there yet?”
Before I answer that I just want to have a word about deadlines and whether they are helpful or not. Personally, I believe they are vital. They help focus everyone in a team. They also help you make difficult decisions, such as ‘will this bit of functionality make the cut’ aka ‘does the product really need this?’. If there’s not enough time, there’s not enough time - unless it’s a core part of your product. Deadlines also tell you an awful lot about the people in your team, their abilities and their thinking under pressure.
“Tea cups and tantrums”
The World Cup winning coach Clive Woodward hilariously and without any embarrassment calls this T-CUP, “Thinking correctly under pressure”. People under pressure will always fall in to two groups when confonted with a problem: one type will find a way to solve it and the other type will find a way not to solve it. The more important part is to realise that both types will try to ’spread’ their viewpoint throughout the team. One is positive, one is negative and pressure will show this up everytime.
I once inherited a development team (not as fortuitous as it sounds) which had a particularly lazy developer within it; when it came to Crunch Time he was totally unable (unwilling might be more accurate) to estimate any of his work and rather than aim for something and miss he completly froze. Instead, when asked how long a certain job would take, he replied with the following gem that has stayed with me ever since:
“It will be ready, when it’s ready. I work by the ID credo”
Which I suppose is fine if you are in fact working for ID, the developer of, at one point, the definitive First Person Shooters (Doom & Quake). Not suprisingly I met with the CEO and we made the decision that the programmer should contact ID games to see if they had any work for him. Even with a deadline looming, I felt it better to jettison deadweight and keep the team positive, if overworked! Negativity is a deadly cancer in a development team and must be cut out immediately.
“I love deadlines. I love the wooshing noise they make as they go by” - Douglas Adams
The other reason deadlines are important is that they a vital piece of external communication. They tell your customer when something will be ready. It also forces you to communicate with your customer during development if the date looks like it’s going to slip. Better to talk to them, get their feedback as something that is pushing the deadline back could be cut if they deem getting the product more vital than having function x working. Of course, by doing that you put pressure on yourself to deliver and that’s the nature of deadlines (the Etymology of that word is quite stark). Without being too glib, if you don’t like deadlines then product development is definately the wrong job for you.
So are we there yet?
Yes. Actually, after that massive preamble, ‘Yes’ doesn’t feel a big enough statement of euphoria really so feel free to insert the profanity of your choice here: #$%*** Yes!
It feels really amazing to say this. We’ve a few little glitches to sort (well, that’s what beta testing is for) and some polishing to do but amazingly we’ve hit our March 1st deadline. Which considering we only have two engineers on the project, one of whom is a recent graduate and the other has a full-time job, this is phenomenal. In fact, I’ll go further than that, it’s nothing short of miraculous and proves you do not need big budget development teams for startups. No, what you need are these two things (assuming you’ve the ability): Positivity and Dedication.
Okay, better crack on, I’ve got another project whose deadline is next week! Where’s that coffee!?
