Optimism is bad

It finally hit me - the lesson learned in 1998 that I should be taking into this project: Optimism is bad. It's bad in project managers and bad in developers.

I've been consistently too optimistic in scheduling and managing dates, and the team has been too optimistic in believing that all bugs will be resolved at the last minute to be ready for user testing. Great quotes from the daily scrums: "Two days is an eternity in developer time." And, "Are you seeing any reasons to think we won't be ready to test on Monday?" Optimism...

This is the same thing that happened to me in 1998 with the BellSouth interactive training software. I'd test the beta and have no problems, schedule testing in Atlanta with the sense that nothing would go wrong, and then encounter problems with varying test platforms, missing video drivers and hardware, equipment damaged on arrival, or some other thing. Once we got through the optimistic dates and hopes that we would be ready for scheduled training deadlines and instead assumed the worst, we got the project done, and everyone stayed employed to work another day.

So - we're adjusting our sights and approach to remove optimism and instead rely on the bug reports and test data to tell us when we are ready to bring our users back in. And, we are setting the expectation that we will need to do a few more rounds of this before we are ready to release. The date will slip into the new year, but everyone seems ready to accept that as the price of a quality project. Best of all, our sponsor and key stakeholder are in accord that this is the way to go.