En route to a client visit today, I stopped by the IBM Research Labs at Hawthorne, NY to learn about some cool new projects and to give a brief talk at the 2007 SWEFT conference - an internal, IBM Academy of Technology -sponsored conference - "Software Engineering for Tomorrow."
As you'd expect, my talk was about outside-in development. One of the topics covered today was when to celebrate success on a development project. Hint: not when you release the code!
Everything we do on a software project up until product ship is internally focused. (Let's for the moment ignore all the iterative client involvement and such.) So to get all excited about shipping the code kind of misses the point of being an outside-in thinker. Instead, the meaningful stakeholder-centered activity occurs after the software ships.
That's when our early adopter clients get to really throw the code around, and presumably put it into production. Their success is the true measure of our success.
That's why I advocate picking some simple, outside-in success metrics early on in a project. For example: let's have four clients successfully in production in the first 60 days post release.
Once we hit that success milestone, it really is time to celebrate!
(Image attribution: www.flickr.com/photo_zoom.gne?id=495408726&size=m; diametrik)
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