Somehow I always seem to end up coding the user stories that have the most demanding time constraints. In a way, I feel flattered that someone trusts my ability to deliver when a critical deadline must be met (and real deadlines are very rare in software, despite what everyone tells you), but it is always interesting to see how people react when a critical deadline must be met.

Over the numerous occasions that I have been working on these “time critical” stories, the common question you are normally asked is, “So when do you think we’re going to be done?” or better yet, “Is it ready yet?” As a developer I find it is better to preempt these sorts of questions by delivering feedback earlier than they expect. Typically this means walking through significant, visible progress with the stakeholder, or bringing visibility to issues that are hindering your ability to deliver (e.g. database environments not available, etc). Customers are typically trained to ask “Is it ready?” because they are given such little feedback. The customer should not be surprised when something will be delivered and it easy to forget this.

Another question that you tend to get asked is, “Can you get it done any faster?” Speed is essential to any business, but it is important to highlight what you sacrifice for speedy delivery. Translated into software terms, this may mean less regression tests to provide automated feedback of features breaking when future changes are made, duplicated code, leading to confusion, additional maintenance and even developer shame, or an undesirable path that meets requirements but leads to an unacceptably sluggish solution as load increases. When time is critical, ideally the business should be prioritising which things are more important, but usually it is left for developers (for better or worse).

Achieving your goals as fast as you possibly can is good, but keep in mind that developers are more like runners than they are computers and do get “tired” (for want of a better term). If you want to run a marathon, you certainly don’t run at the same speed as you would the 100m. Instead of asking how fast you can run, the question that should be first asked is how far do you want to go?