GR Testers - May Meeting

DEADLINES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Pete finds them terribly amusing...

Matt - "We must ship/deliver by date <blah>"  should be followed by "Or what?"
... Sometimes the answer is "well, we have a big trade show that week" or "there are some regularoty things that need to be in place by X and this is needed before then" or some other good reason - other times is "well, I kinda mentioned it to this guy from this office when we were playing golf and they wanted this by then, so that is the deadline..."

Other times it could be budget constraints or other stuff...
I was on a contract that had $50 million riding on hitting a deadline...

Pete cites Scott Barber's "Some exec has this as a performance criteria and if he hits the date he gets a big bonus and can buy a bigger yacht."

Damian - war story - project had a buch of stuff - loads of information - estimate given of 18 months - NO!  You have SIX months! - It was 2 weeks short of 18 months.  BAD testers...

Matt talking about Lister's idea of general delivery stuff - instead of "December 5th" put "4th Quarter" - OR - what about ,,, where do these things COME from?

Sometimes, the golf course..

Sometimes, the sales guy came up with stuff and committed to.  

Sometimes we can discuss this more reasonably
The more you recognize the source, the easier it is to come up with a coping strategy...   Add resources, descope, etc.

So, these annecdotes are all about waterfall stuff.  What about Agile?

That is a slightly different question - If we are REALLY doing Agile, we know that we can get stuff out regularly - every X weeks.  

Matt observes that if you measure all the components of the human body in a linear form (feet, legs, torso, neck...) do you get your height?  Really?  Try it.  :)

Heusser's Law:  A bunch of guesses times a bunch of guesses, add some more guesses and divide it by more guesses is just made up.

and then he tweeted: mheusser‏@mheusser
Too many 'process quality improvement' groups are actually 'process do everything the same' groups. #iso9000

Matt's discussion of goals vs. deadlines; take the deadline, but drive to a more aggressive "internal goal".

Goldratt's Critical Change

You can get a lot of cred by citing that book, others will defer to Lister or Deming (if you go that way... citing authroity is not always recommended...)

Phil is snoring - not saying very much.  He may be thinking - he's kinda chuckling from time to time.  Or, he may be thinking he's glad he has not worked at the places some of us have worked at.