A Calmer Sprint to GA
I’ve been busy the last few weeks working with my team to put the finishing touches on the GA release of our product and pushing this bad-boy out the door. Today I walked around and coordinated the efforts of everyone involved to make sure we could make next Friday – Admin, Documentation, Customer Support, QA, IT, Development and Sales.
What’s interesting was the reply from some involved;
QA – We need to test more…
Development – Just a few more bugs…
Documentation – We need more time…
Sales – We’re not GA yet? Get this thing out the door…
These are just a few of the responses I got today from people and it made me think of a release that did not involve a lot of work up until the last minute, whether it was a complete software product or deploying a website. Once you set a release date the gates in your mind unlock and unleash a flood of tasks that need to get done before you go out the door.
I pushed our release out by 3 months so we could ensure we put out a strong featured, quality release that our Sales team and company could be proud to sell and support. And we’ve hit that target, now it’s time to show it to the world. I know that next week is going to be a Gong show as people try to get in their last fix, test, bell, whistle, etc. And herein starts the typical manic sprint.
The main difference between this release and others I have done is that this time I have been managing the whole thing for about 2 years – Development, Product Management, QA, Trials, etc – whereas in the past I was only doing development… and only developing at that. I thought I had gone through all the roles of getting a piece of software defined, built and tested but I missed one role – The Calmer. Between now and next week my role is going to pretty much entail talking to people, seeing how their doing and reassuring them that they have done a good job and we’re ready for this. For some guys on my team, this is very new to them, they’ve been in a vacuum for the past year and now faceless people are going to be using their baby. In this capacity, the Calmer is incredibly necessary, otherwise people get sucked into all the denizens of questions that start floating around the office.
Here’s what I’ve identified as successful traits of a good Calmer:
- Bugs will go out the door, it is software, we will mitigate, but someone will call with a problem,
- We’re doing lots of great testing, let’s stay on target, we don’t need to start doing the hair-brained tests where we jack the drive and see what happens.
- We have a strong featureset – we don’t need to put more bells on it. Our customers like it and Sales can sell it.
The one thing I’ve noticed that seems to really calm people is when I tell them “Don’t worry, we’re going to help them, we’re not going to leave them stranded”. It’s like a wave of calm rushes over them and they’re able to focus on their job again which is the Number 1 job of the Calmer – keep people focused on their tasks until the last day, don’t let them get pulled into anything else.
As I’m beginning to understand, the Calmer is the last required role in a release to make it a smooth sprint to the finish as opposed to stumbling out of the start gate.