Get It Done Yesterday

As I was writing my last post, it occurred to me that some businesses have come up with solutions to the so called "development timeline creep" - they require it to be done yesterday.

I ran into this at my last job where we had to produce a software build weekly. It didn't matter if the add-on or new feature might require more meetings to define it, in the end we were expected to provide a solution yesterday. Not.

There are other things that suffer in that sort of environment, such as: documentation, object reuse, code redundancy, and bugs. We had an one entire person dedicated to fixing bugs and they were busy!

I am sure there has to be a happy medium out there. It is important to be able to properly design software as well as new features. Additionally, it is important to provide value for each dollar a customer commits to a project. Truly, as professionals our job should be to make the customers happy and hopefully gain additional work due to our ability to get the job done, not because we never finished or embedded too many bugs.