“Oh where, oh where, can my baby be…”
Life is stressful! And no, Theresa is not pregnant and hasn’t left me (any other interpretations of that title?).
Work has been… something akin to dealing with the federal government any time you need one of their services. [I apologize in advance for significant lack of specificity, unfortunately, there are certain things about Cisco’s release schedule and feature lists that I can’t make public.] About a month ago, my business unit released a major update to the software image for my product. This release, was originally supposed to be done out of a more sophisticated branch of our code that had some interesting improvements, However, some stability issues made management question our ability to get a quality product out the door in the time frame desired so we included the stable upgrades in an older branch and went with that while deciding that the next major release would be out of the new branch. Well, our last release kept getting longer and longer because of feature creep to the point that it had started to overgrow our next release cycle. Normally, I don’t think this would be a big deal because both Cisco and our customers prefer having quality products over meeting a hard date. Unfortunately, Cisco has this huge company wide initiative to have a single point of management for network devices (kudos to Cisco) which has a set plan that is nearly impossible to deviate from. This initiative is basically dictating our next release date, which is kind of a problem, because we have a number of feature requirements we have to meet for a few clients. I happen to be working on one of those requirements. To avoid an excessively long and irritating narration (for both you and me), here is the order of events for the last couple months:
- 8.2 released; Planning begins for next major release
- Feature list decided, because of compressed schedule, development branch in question; Developers instructed to spec out and estimate features
- One month later, branch decided to be the enhanced version
- A few days later, sr. management tells the BU that our release must coincide with Cisco’s company initiative (good decision in general)
- QA tells dev they need 6 months to test and that this must be finished by the end of the year, so code complete must be in just 2 short months
- Dev managers try to split the next release into two parts, one for the initiative and another for our own goals; Branch also redirected to the same as the last release… we must merge over all of our work to date
- Someone in management somewhere notices that dropping certain features (mine included) from the first release could be bad, so we wedge it back in and come up with a very interesting schedule for timed development
- Sr. management gets upset that the schedule is so long and wants to know why they didn’t know about it before (even though my project has been planned for 4 years and the original estimate was a 12 mo. cycle)
- Management decides we must have a time based release and anything that can’t be completed by X date is out
- I’m out 🙁
Its not woe is me… from a business point of view my management really is making the best decisions… its just frustrating that I’ve been working hard on a feature for 2 months that is no longer scheduled for release. Fortunately, my feature is still a requirement for certain contracts so I’m pretty sure it will be included in the near future and I don’t think my attention will be redirected, perhaps realigned since the scope of the feature is now different, but my work isn’t just going away. However, this whole process has been very stressful… inflamed by other concerns in my life.
What other concerns you ask? I’m trying to buy a house. That is quite another saga… that I’ll share sometime soon (I hope).