Delivery Schedule

Frank Patrick talks about scheduling a delivery, and relates it to a scene in an HBO movie about the Apollo program:

"Schedule Chicken" is one of my favorites. If you've ever seen the HBO Series "From the Earth to the Moon," about the Apollo program, you might remember what was my favorite episode -- the one about the Grumman engineers building the lunar lander. There's a great scene in which everyone goes around the table saying "Sure, my group's on track." until one admits the reality of needing some more time, at which point everyone then backtracks, saying, "Well, since Joe will need more time, we could use it to..." There's other PM wisdom and reality spread out in that episode. Check it out if you get a chance.

I see this every release schedule here. Towards the end, we have release meetings where we go over the high and critical bugs. The idea is, engineers who have a bug that needs fixing prior to release have to get dispensation from the rest of the team - either by explaining that there won't be a regression, or that the bug is so bad that we have no choice - you get the idea.

Towards the very end of that exercise, we start doing candidate builds. When there's something wrong in a candidate build, I see the same reaction Frank mentions: "well, so long as we are cracking the build, can we sneak this in..." - comes up every release cycle.

Sounds to me like this sort of thing is endemic to all engineering work - both hardware and software.