Ask someone when they are going to have something done and their immediate answer is going to be “In a sec”, “In a few minutes”, etc, etc.
Translation – “I am so good I will have all my work done within 2 minutes and you will bow before my glory”.
Perhaps not quite, but you get the idea, we want to impress someone with how fast you can get something done while ignoring how long it will take for everyone on the team to get it done and get it done right.
If you can get your fix up to the dev server in 2 minutes congrats – good work. But if it takes you another 10 compiles and pushes because you went too fast you’ve not only wasted your time but the time of your QA team to validate the fix and your customer to eventually accept it – all because you wanted to impress someone.
Here’s how you impress someone when they ask you how long is it going to take;
- I need 15 minutes to code it and validate it.
- QA will need another 10 to run their own tests.
- So in 25 – 30 minutes we’ll have something solid to show the customer.
After all, no one calls the customer up immediately after your estimate to tell them it is actually going to be ready in 2 minutes.
