Agile To Do List: Fail (or Succeed) Quickly
I read a book by Seth Godin a while back called "The Dip." (Well, by read I mean I listened to it after buying it from Audible.) The book gets a bit repetitive but the message is relevant. It is a book about quitting as a technique for success.
I am going to repeat that for those of you skimming this post: "The Dip" is a book about quitting as a technique for success.
Initially this should seem strange. For some reason society seems to think "winners never quit." Society is wrong. Winners quit. They quit so quickly that you might not even notice they tried at all. That is the whole point.
In my post on Prioritizing Work I talk about how we need to work from a backlog that orders stories by value. Most often you will find that the high value items are usually difficult. A difficult item with low business value is something that likely will never be done - why would you waste time working on a problem that has no value. At times you will find that a projects success hinges on completing some difficult items. They may be so difficult that , for many reasons, they are impossible and the software project is doomed to fail. That is why we need to build these features first.
If a software project fails after one week, great! This is the best possible way to fail: very little time and effort invested. Chances are there is disappointment but everyone survives.
Software projects that take years to fail bring down companies. I have personally seen it happen.
The only thing better than failing quickly is succeeding quickly. What better success to start a project with: tackling the hardest problem!
In XP they would call this a spike solution. In Scrum this is the way we organize our backlog. Either way the concept is simple: don’t invest time and effort into a project that you cannot finish.
Failing early is the key to success.
I realized that this really answers a simple question and then presents a much harder one. Namely, you need to know if the problem you are working on is hard or if it is impossible.
I don’t have the answer for this one. There is no sure-fire way to measure your talent or that of your team and know if you will succeed. Analyze the problem. Be realistic about the availability of the resources need to complete it. Think about what is needed to succeed. Is success possible. Weigh the risks and rewards.
It is hard to predict success and failure. That is not what this is about. It is about honestly evaluating if success is an option and if failure is inevitable.
If you can’t succeed, fail quickly.
Start small. Think BIG.