Recovering from a Mission Critical Whiff
Editorial note: I originally wrote this post for the NDepend blog. You can check out the original here, at their site. While you’re there, download NDepend and give it a try.
A career in software produces a handful of truly iconic moments. First, you beam with pride the first time something you wrote works in production. Then, you recoil in horror the first time you bring your team’s project to a screeching halt with a broken build or some sort of obliteration of the day’s source history. And so it goes at the individual level.
But so it also goes at the team or department level, with diluted individual responsibility and higher stakes. Everyone enjoys that first major launch party. And, on the flip side, everyone shudders to recall their first death march. But perhaps no moment produces as many hangdog looks and feelings as the collective, mission critical whiff.
I bet you can picture it. Your group starts charging at an aggressive deadline, convinced you’ll get there. The program or company has its skeptics, and you fall behind schedule, but you resolve to prove them wrong. External stakes run high, but somehow your collective pride trumps even that. At various points during the project, stakeholders offer a reprieve in the form of extensions, but you assure them you get there.
It requires a lot of nights and weekends, and even some all nighters in the run up to launch. But somehow, you get there. You ship your project with an exhausted feeling of pride.
And then all hell breaks loose.
Major bugs stream in. The technical debt you knew you’d piled up comes due. Customers get irate and laugh sardonically at the new shipment. And, up and down the organizational ladder, people fume. Uh oh.
How do you handle this? What can you learn?