“The best surfer out there is the one having the most fun.” (Duke Kahanamoku 1890–1968)
More than a few years ago, when I was a brand new engineering manager, I felt a thrill of hope upon seeing the subtitle of a certain book on software development (RD): “Taming Wild Software Schedules”. A thrill of hope, and at the same time a big pang of fear. Could it be possible that reading this book would really help me solve my problem?
As the manager of the team working on the platform for all our products, I had to coordinate with teams working on runtime middleware and the application. This was a complex coordination that required all teams to deliver their commitments on time. We had customer delivery dates for specific features. Sometimes my team had to be able to commit to deliver something big in 3 months, 6 months, or a year, and then we had to execute on that plan. At that time, sometimes we made it, sometimes we didn’t.
You can read a book on how to fly a plane, but you can’t pilot one without a lot of hands-on practice. Do you still have to read the book? Yes: you have to do both. Flying, surfing, and managing high performance teams take both skill and know-how.
Fast-forward a few years. Happily I know now that the key lessons outlined in Rapid Development will, when done correctly, keep your team on track and happy. One reason the book is so helpful is that the research that’s been done on this topic can give you the faith to keep executing until you reap the rewards of delivering great software on time.
Here are a few of those unintuitive but proven tidbits:
- Do testing up front, including unit tests. Counter-intuitive if you are in a hurry, but it pays off. For example one day of early testing is worth about 3 days of development time later. (RD, p. 45, 69)
- Don’t try to put lots of warm bodies on the project to speed things up and save money. It turns out that hiring contractors usually costs you big time, even if their hourly rate is low. And having more people, especially less skilled ones, will really slow you down. (RD, p.40, 44)
- Team motivation is a huge positive driver of velocity. I’m not talking about a foosball table. Get the highest skilled people you can on the bus, establish the vision, and let your team do its best work. Empower your team, keep team size small, communicate, and remove roadblocks. (RD, pp. 285- 289)
So let’s do it. Deliver great stuff on time: make the hope a reality.