Introducing the mysterious turnover moment in every project

28 Mar 2014 – 1 minutes to read

There is a severe problem arising from the fact that both customer and contractor seem to change after the project deadline has been reached.

The agile dilemma

Trying to sell an agile approach to project management to clients is sometimes more than difficult. After reading the Why clients should be more agile I have been thinking about wether we as contractors simply fail to convince our customers of the benefits of going agile or if our clients are not ready for such a radical change in culture yet.

Three simple truths - so hard to believe

I am convinced that these hold true about every software development project:

• It’s impossible to gather all of the requirements at the start of the project.
• Whatever requirements you do gather are guaranteed to change.
• There will always be more to do than time or budget will allow.

While it is perfectly natural for every developer and web consulting company to embrace the bittersweet truth behind these three facts of life, clients seem to disagree every once in a while and insist on trying to bend the universe as if it was possible to actually make an exception just this once.

I often experience the best intentions being tossed overboard after deadlines have been meet. The first day after a new application, web app or site goes into production all principles and asumptions that held true during development somehow do not make it into the post-release project phase.

Contrary to the fact, that after moving the project into deployment we need to be double careful when running updates, since we are dealing with a running system, the client suddenly treats every small requirement as urgent and asumes ad hoc reaction on the development team part. It is correct that small bugs can be fixed fast and efficient without proper relase planing. Especially if you follow continuous integration precedures. Still the fact that new bugs get introduced just as fast as old chores get resolved goes mostly unnoticed.