Early in my career, I learned a simple 'demo day' rule: never demo things that aren't end-to-end done.
When you do, it can easily confuse folks who aren't deeply involved in your project ("haven't I seen this already?") and can hurt team morale because they never get a "shipped it" moment that feels good.
More to the point: enforcing this rule incentivizes teams to build things in small, shippable components. Nobody wants to be left out of demo day multiple weeks in a row.
Also, never use the word "done" in any context in a meeting like that. Do not even say: "I'm not done". They won't hear the "not". Say, "Development is still in progress" or something similar. I got chewed out for something being released (where it was found to be broken) to a customer because I said something like: "I'm about 80% done with testing, but I haven't run into any issues yet." They released it even though it wasn't ready, and both the customer and I found that there were issues in that last 20% I hadn't reached.
> Early in my career, I learned a simple 'demo day' rule: never demo things that aren't end-to-end done.
I take a different but similar approach when I run into situations where I want to get something small in front of a business user before it’s completely ready: I make sure it’s visibly broken in a way that doesn’t detract from my goal for the meeting.
For example: I have a registration form that I want to talk through. The state drop down will only have 3 entries, one validation error will always display, and on final submit you get a “failed” alert instead of a dummy page.
It lets me walk through the page and get whatever feedback I need, but it feels completely broken so non-technical users expect it to take more time to conplete.
While I agree, the feedback I get from a session like that is useless:
"While you mentioned this during the demo, I noted:
1. Your state-drop down has only 3 entries.
2. There is a validation error
3. You get an error at the end.
Yup, that'll happen, and if you omit it entirely you can get comments going "I'm not seeing this field!".
Would it be better to show no progress at all until it's completely done? I know agile methodologies tell you to demo regularly, but I'm more and more under the impression that they are to provide progress feedback / reports to management.
I remember someone suggesting using deliberately crude and hand-drawn looking UI elements in the demo. That communicates to non-technical users that it's just a prototype.
Honestly, that feels like a huge waste of your own time to game a broken system. And I'm guessing it is, but that it's a defensive move because the darker timeline is miserable.
What's broken are humans. For some psychological reason, a thing that looks unfinished gets much higher quality feedback than something that looks polished. There's no way around that flaw in people, so making prototypes look unfinished is something we have to do anyway!
Perhaps because “unfinished” offers stakeholders the opportunity to make major contributions, whereas “finished” means it’s already too late to make changes now so anything they do say will just be ignored.
Yeah it’s all perception, but cultivating the right perception is vital to effective, productive communication.
It's an example of the Doorway Effect: brains are wired to work in modes related to context cues. Change the context, and you'll change the memories and trains-of-thought easily accessed.
Polished things have a context of "use", not "evaluate", because we use so many polished things every day, but very rarely have any need to evaluate them (mostly only when we're buying them, or when a repair person asks us to describe what's wrong with them.) Whereas unpolished things are mostly "for" evaluating; it's rare that people use unpolished things (outside of, say, disaster-relief infrastructure.)
> For some psychological reason, a thing that looks unfinished gets much higher quality feedback than something that looks polished.
Does this really imply “humans are broken”? We all have limited resources and I think this could just be a first order prioritization mechanism. Of course one has to be aware of the bias but that’s a different problem.
it's not a way of gaming the system, but a way of prompting better feedback. For instance, in a Design Thinking process prototypes are more useful when they look rough/unfinished. A more polished piece of work might result in people being afraid to break things.
I use both approaches in my work:
1) demo small, tested bits during show and tells and any meetings where the point is to demonstrate progress.
2) demo large, unfinished and barely stable pieces of work when ideating, trying to figure out the next steps
2) is hard and works only if:
- we know what the unstable parts are (because we have tests, so we know the gaps)
- we know the audience and how much context they have
I've done this on quite a few occasions as well. It isn't necessarily time wasted, as you evoke a positive view from the client (progress towards the solution) and often get valuable feedback.
The alternative is that they think you are done, adding more pressure, and requiring more wasted time later explaining the mis-aligned expectations.
If hes talking about JavaScript an alert dialog is a single line of code so I dont think its that bad. Also as long as frontend and backend have agreed on what certain objects structures will be hardcoding shouldnt be an issue.
I don't do that. When I demo something I need feedback on, I demo the best version I've got. If it still requires work, I say so. This seems to work quite well for me.
Did you really get chewed out? That seems pretty much like a deal breaker for me. Managers are collaborators, not parents, and have no place talking to co-workers in such a diminutive manner.
Yes. He came to my desk a week or so after he okayed the release of the software and took me to a conference room. I don't know how long he chewed me out for because I was red with rage but too terrified of losing my job to say anything. I've experienced similar rage with only one other manager [1]. He was 3 levels above me in the management chain, I really liked the two above me (the test manager, as I was in test at the time, and the software manager) and the guy above him [0]. I wanted to stay with them and I had a good friend there as well. But I did apply for a new job a couple months later, and left by the end of the year.
It was my first professional development job and I learned a lot of things. One of the keys was this:
Your boss and employer are not your friends. When you promise something to your friends, you owe it without any expectation of reward or return. But your employer owes you something for everything you give them. If they fail to meet their end of the bargain, that's on them and you are absolutely 100% free to leave. That can be money, time off, good working conditions, respect, trust, or any number of things. For me money was not primary (though it is nice): I wanted a good work environment, interesting work, and respect. Fail any of those and I will be looking for an exit, even if it's just a transfer within the same company. But respect is first in that. A boss who shows little respect to his employees is not someone I want to be around. I had that boss who chewed me out, I had another that kept me doing busy work for a year and kept saying worthless platitudes like "you're important to our work, we can't do this without you" when everything pointed to that being false. He was just empire building and trying to grow his direct report count, but it hurt those of us under him because he didn't have the work (but he did have the money) to keep us there. (I was still relatively junior at that job and stayed longer than I should've.)
[0] The hierarchy was something like: VP of Engineering (several divisions below him) -> Chief of Engineer (Aviation) -> Chief of Software (Aviation) -> Chief of Testing (Aviation) -> Me; other production lines had similar chains below the VP.
[1] When she was my manager I quit, or more accurately transferred to another group. Years later, I quit my last job for several reasons, one was her. She was not in our division while I was in that position, but they'd just hired her on. When I heard the name I had to verify, when I confirmed it was the same person I was ready to exit.
Reading your comment reminds me of how sheltered and lucky I've been in my career. If my manager released something after I said I was 80% done with it I'd go have a talk with him about how "we" can avoid making that mistake again and what process needs to change to prevent similar errors.
If he tried to chew me out, I'd just say "That's not how I remember things. I said I was 80% done, and, frankly, it was a mistake for you to pull the trigger on the release without confirming with me first."
Yeah, I'd have the same conversation with my manager and she'd apologize. I don't think you have been lucky, such a reaction is just a normal adult civilized reaction.
Well, that gets to my other lesson: Save money aggressively so I'm not beholden to any employer. It's harder when you're taking care of a family on one income (and not making FAANG money), but I saved aggressively when I was young and single. I never actually had to use that option, but I was in a position where I could have lived (as a single healthy guy with no debt) for 4-5 years without needing a paycheck. I wouldn't have lived well mind you, it would've been tight to stretch it that far, but it was possible. My main mistake was putting too much in my 401k. I'm set when I retire, but I still don't have enough assets to get me to retirement.
This works even when you're on a visa, but can take longer to be truly comfortable. I had a classmate in college who'd secured a work visa. His plan was to work for perhaps a decade in the US, save aggressively, and then return to his home country. Salaries in the US were 10x higher at the time than in his home country. Saving even 20%/year meant saving 2 years' of income every year he worked. And he was frugal enough to save a lot more than that. Invested well, taking what he learned back home, he would be set for life at this point (I didn't stay in touch so I only know the plan started well, not how it turned out).
Look up the 72(t) rule relating to a 401k. You can retire early and start withdrawals at any age without penalty, as long as you continue the withdrawals for sufficient time (the longer of five years or until age 59.5.) This fixes the "too much in the 401k" situation.
Yes, but you don't have to spend it all. You could take just what you need to live on and invest the rest elsewhere. You'd give up some of the tax-deferral advantages of the 401k, of course.
(Perhaps you could roll over part of the 401k into an IRA first, and then take the rest as 72(t)?)
A 401k is specifically a retirement account - you pay an extra 10% for withdrawing from it before age 59.5, which should add context to the rest of their paragraph.
Look up the 72(t) rule relating to a 401k. You can retire early and start withdrawals at any age without penalty, as long as you continue the withdrawals for sufficient time (the longer of five years or until age 59.5.) This fixes the "too much in the 401k" situation.
Less than full liquidity. If you get a decent matching contribution from your employer, it's probably worthwhile. Otherwise, it may be kind of a toss-up.
At a minimum, you should save enough to your 401K to get the company matching.
Let's say the company match 50% on the first 6% you save.
So if you put 6% of your salary to 401k, the company will add another 3% in addition to what you did. That's a free 3% raise.
Tell me another way that you can get guaranteed 50% return of your money.
In addition, there is the tax advantage where you do not get taxed on your money until you retire. So you money grow without taxes until you actually need them.
Are there bad 401k? yes, but I think very few. Check the rules of your company. But most of them are very good deals and you should take advantage of them if you can.
> He was 3 levels above me in the management chain, I really liked the two above me (the test manager, as I was in test at the time, and the software manager) and the guy above him [0]
I happen to get along really well with the person three levels above me, but I can't imagine dealing with getting direct negative feedback from him. Honestly, more of my conversations with him over the years have probably been about things unrelated to work than work-related; we don't just hop over my direct manager and his boss unless there's a really good reason for it.
Parents are not supposed to talk to kids the way chewing managers talk to people. Also, business oriented managers are not collaborators in my experience and take such idea as offence.
And yep, I was actively avoiding that environment too.
One thing I learned very early in workplaces where there are "project management professionals" is to NEVER to casually mention even the implication "dates" and "completion" anywhere near each other.
Someone is bound to jot that down and interpret it as a hard commitment regardless of any other details or conditions.
In a company that understands and embraces agile software practices, this works well. You demo small things that are done, and prototypes are understood as just mockups designed to drive future work. Alas not everyone in power gets it. In more egregious cases, I've been in adversarial environments where teams were pitted against each other to appear "more done." Obviously a recipe for failure. I'm fortunate enough to be able to be more selective in where I work now, and have the experience to drive the choice.
I've come to realised this, "true" agile is more like being funny and smart(not that I am either). If you have to tell people you are smart or funny, you probably are not. Ever noticed how smart people(the really clever ones) are just absurdly smart without walking around telling everyone "hey I'm smart", usually the nicer they are the more intelligent they are(yea you get exceptions), same with funny :)
I feel it goes double for "agile-processes" if you have to walk around and tell everyone (management or interviewees how agile your process is, it's probably not)
It feels like "agile" is such an overloaded word these days. In most settings it just means a specific workflow centered around Scrum or to a lesser extent Kanban. The only true difference from old school waterfall and month long specs is shorter iteration cycles. A "sprint" or "iteration" is still treated as a rigid block of work.
On the other hand if you have a look at the original Agile Manifesto[0] it is a different beast all together. It specifically seems to go against using set processes altogether and basically boils down to nurture organic communication, to adapt and focus on getting shit done.
I suppose the "agile" in the former sense is a compromise to edge closer to the latter, while still maintaining a familiar corporate structure.
That's...a great point, actually. The most humane (and incidentally, agile) workplaces I've met didn't mention agile much: "yeah, we do this and that, we just want to have a sane environment."
The places that went "we do all the agile incantations in the book, because that's the only way," well, those actually had a scrum-o-fall culture.
Yeah, but there's a big difference between working on a TV show that's meant to be a comedy where people are trying to be funny, and working on a TV show that's meant to be a drama that isn't a parody. Both might have the same "actual goal" of trying to get good ratings, but if you're trying to put jokes in the show that's meant to be dead serious because you mistakenly thought everyone in the writer's room was trying to be funny...
If you want to be working with a team trying to be funny, at some point you have to use the word "funny" and "comedy" to make sure you all are actually trying to do the same thing. And make sure the producers and show runners agree that it's a comedy you're making.
There's no greener grass on the other side.
I've been in the big consulting business, and sometimes you can't get a client to schedule a meeting for months, so you're flying blind, with absolutely no feedback.
And then we go into the typical cycle of "Lessons Learned" etc, because what you've developed is irrelevant to the client.
That's a funny comparison to demo days early in my career. The company I worked at had too much upper management that would hijack dev teams to make "cool" features constantly. We only had to make something good enough to appear like it worked in a demo though, because then that upper manager would get his bonus or look good to the CEO or CTO and we could move back to doing real work.
I'm still conflicted about this. On the one hand I agree. On the other, I wish we could educate people enough for them to understand Proof of Concepts and Minimum Viable Products.
It depends on the audience. A customer demo is different than an internal demo, and I assume you are referring to an internal demo.
You must demo the product in a form that leaves the right impression of the current state. If you are painting a picture of a polished product, expect polished expectations. Instead, show the bugs and say "we are still working through this section" Show missing pages, show your work in progress. Show wrong colors. Show potential, wave your hands and tell them to imagine this part working. Don't fake it. If that feels wrong, then a demo isn't right.
If you show it in a form that looks complete and polished, even if you say it is not, how can you expect any other conclusion from the viewer other than "it's practically ready!"?
Great point with the visual appearance: show what you currently have, just include ugly.css. People are wired to understand Comic Sans and hot pink on green intuitively.
I can only agree with that. It is kinda just being honest. I don't know from where come this idea to showcase our work better than it actually is. Is it our own ego, showcasing unfinished/buggy work making us question our competency? Is it the fear of getting negative feedback because it is buggy and unfinished? Is it deeper issue, society making us believe, that what counts is superficial (apparence) way more than it should?
There is a reason that teams with mostly non-technical leadership deliver broken software as your choices are feature driven architecture with absurd glue or being asked "why isn't it done yet"?
This doesn't require that things fit into a single sprint. It just incentivizes teams to ship their work in smaller chunks.
If it helps motivate a team to divide some four-sprint piece of functionality into two shippable chunks that each take two sprints, I'd call that a win. Customers get something a bit faster even if it's not single sprint-sized.
Reiterating what gp said , not all dev is like that, lesser you are doing IT and more comp science or any unfamiliar territory really it is harder to break down ahead of time .
Many times I can’t tell you what tasks need to done let alone how much time is needed and break it into smaller chunks during planning phase.
If planning has to work you should be familiar with what you are building , with poor information on the bug/ code / stack planning agile is just useless overhead . it works great for yet another CRUD app where you know the requirements to the dot and know exactly how to build or fix not always , most management fail to differentiate
All the reasons in the TFA are also why it is hard to estimate , what and how much time will take .
When you’re doing exploratory work, the discipline of stopping, examining what you have learned already, deciding whether the goal still makes sense, and correcting course and reprioritizing seems even more important to me. You don’t know what you will be doing more than a few days ahead? Then your sprint length should be a few days and at the end you recombine and replan.
I mean obviously this only makes sense as a way of organizing a team who are trying to build something exploratory - that’s what scrum is meant for. If you are trying to pursue a solo research project within a team the rest of whom are doing scrum then... that’s not a problem agile can solve.
It is not just only research that is exploratory, even the kind of bug fixes the article talks about can be hard to predict. replication of an issue or understand a new module can be uncertain, race conditions or data specific issues are uncertain too.
Identifying and solving something similar to [1] with a team is not simply possible when you plan with agile. I am likely going to go the next item once I mitigate the effect without bothering to dig deeper just because someone is clocking me on a timeline I committed.
It kills all the joy and fun, work becomes boring, this is by design, it is hard to run an organization unpredictably. If only management trusted you to deliver without looking over shoulder constantly ( when the situation warrants it)..
It is not only a engineer's gripe, it applies to management too, the board/ market forces them to be very short sighted, unless you are musk/jobs/buffet it is hard not to buckle to market pressure and invest in longer term opportunities.
The point is not that planning is bad, it can do a world of good in many including unpredictable situations, it is more that blinding pushing a framework especially agile because it worked somewhere and everyone says so, or the manager can't be bothered or won't risk doing something different as the situation warrants.
Ah - you’ve been subjected to management-by-scrum. I am sorry.
Scrum is a collaboration hack for creative problem solving teams, not a managerial accountability tool. The version of scrum where stand ups are for checking on the team’s progress and velocity is reported on up the org is using the tools of scrum to solve a very different problem than the one that it was designed for.
I’m sorry you don’t believe it’s possible but I can tell you from experience that it is possible to use the processes of scrum and the principles of agile to help a team collaborate on open ended creative problem solving tasks.
Maybe it's finally time to give up on Scrum. Whatever good intentions the original inventors had, whatever idealized situations it may work with perfect unicorn teams, the general experience in the wild of this benighted framework is a tool in the hands of mediocre, inexperienced managers to micromanage, infantilize and monitor developers. It's essentially warmed up command-and-control Taylorism with some feelgood buzzwords and neologisms thrown in. I would even prefer the old horrible Waterfall approach, at least we didn't have all the endless, pointless groomings, standups and retros to attend along with the "we so agile" gaslighting.
Not to put it bluntly but you can not do even small bits of work in 2-3 weeks?
Sometimes your demo is nothing more than 'here it is in the log doing xyz' or 'I added this thing to this config file'. Not all demos are big flashy ordeals. The team I am on right now most of my demos look exactly like that. I can usually do them right after the standup. Our team allows it because we are mostly remote and talking to each other helps.
I personally use scrum as a weapon to make sure management does not overload our teams. Those made up story points are a good way to say 'you have tasked us with 4 months of work in 2 days'. You have to know your manager too. You have to talk to them. Know what they are looking for. Some take a very hands off approach. Some want the nitty gritty details. For both of those a 'oh that is going to take 3 months' may sometimes work. But it does not give them actionable items to help you. The task broken down into some sort of chunked out work does. Sometimes you do not know. It is OK to admit that. That is when you make a discovery story. Make sure they are onboard with that story is to help you find out what is needed. Even then you will still learn along the way.
I worked with one guy who wanted to task things down to 15 minute increments, 6 months from now. He kept failing. Because he was being too narrow. He refused to do story points. Because they were 'stupid' yet management kept piling more stuff on him to fail at. He was in every weekend and in until 9PM every night. Because he had no tools to push back. Give your management numbers and actionable items or they will assume everything is hunky dory.
It's an anti-pattern to simply not demo any progress until done. If you're doing agile right (loaded statement), the solution is to make sure everyone understands what's being done. If the audience is expecting all demos to show complete products, find a different audience to demo done-but-incomplete work. The idea is to get feedback before you've sunk six months into something that may not meet expectations.
Yeah, I could've been more precise about what I meant by "demo day." In my comment, I was thinking about the broader, often companywide demo days that many companies hold.
I wasn't talking about intra-team demos to, say, product owners.
I totally agree. Having weekly demos where we showcase unfinished features has been, in my experience, one of the main avenues where we have learned of issues / conflicts / problems with those features at exactly the right time where we could still fix them.
Not having demos of incomplete features would just hide the issues until they are released to the final customers, creating a problem you didn't have before, and making it much more complex to solve.
Progress gets quantized. Some quanta are small, easily shown, etc... other quanta are a bit bigger, less easily shown.
There is a similar problem in manufacturing.
Atomic releases.
While making something, there are many subtle tweaks to the BOM. Changes, substitutions, removals, adds.
Upstream people can make a real mess out of all that, and one way to prevent it is to only deliver releases that are resolved and intended for manufacture.
"where is revision 4?"
Doesn't exist, won't get manufactured, etc... "Use Revision 5 plz."
For the case of insuring expectations get aligned, a mock up can be used. Deliberately used to generate a spec.
People can hide the fact that they have a big ball of mud fir a very long time, and they only want to talk about improvement after hunts have gotten miserable.
4-11 years depending on exactly what you'd define as "brownfield"
> People can hide the fact that they have a big ball of mud fir a very long time, and they only want to talk about improvement after hunts have gotten miserable.
True but beside the point. The same point stands: you can always find a way to make a worthwhile improvement in two weeks - something that's useful on its own, even if it's also the first step of a much bigger improvement plan.
Unlikely. I used to go looking for tasks that couldn't be broken down; I'd get excited when someone would claim that their task couldn't be broken down. But they always could, and it was never even hard.
My task is to implement a model that takes advantage of unified field theory to simulate arbitrary bodies in spacetime, first the mathematical models behind it need to be created then implemented in software.
> My task is to implement a model that takes advantage of unified field theory to simulate arbitrary bodies in spacetime
Sure, sounds straightforward enough. Start with simple cases (e.g. universe is a unit circle), you can definitely implement useful pieces within two weeks.
> first the mathematical models behind it need to be created then implemented in software.
The problem with this is that to produce quality, you actually need iterative feedback from stakeholders and users/user representatives. If you don't show anyone anything until it's "done", you are doing work in a direction that would have been better informed by more feedback.
(Cause another lesson is that people have a lot of trouble giving worthwhile feedback on a verbal/written description of something, they gotta see a thing in front of them).
But I think that's still possible. For example when testing a new idea that just takes some months, it's pointless to show an alpha version where half of the buttons create error messages - even if it solves a much more valuable problem and these errors could be ignored. Instead one should make a presentation of a mockup or a screen recording how a single feature will work. That's much more digestible for everybody and gives far better results if the one watching has anyways only 3 minutes time.
> Early in my career, I learned a simple 'demo day' rule: never demo things that aren't end-to-end done.
I've learned this adage years ago (I think it was from Spolsky), but nowadays I'm in a project (re)building an UI from scratch as a sole developer aaaand I made the same mistake.
I was doing some UI prototypes about activating a process, big green Activate button, opens up a confirmation dialog, spinners with some artificial / simulated delay because I didn't do the back-end, and it caused confusion with our tester because she was wondering if activation actually works.
I've got three options; remove the button for now (I should do that), partially implement the activation (changing a status in the back-end), or fully implement the activation (which has a lot more prerequisites).
> Early in my career, I learned a simple 'demo day' rule: never demo things that aren't end-to-end done.
I've learned the opposite. If I communicate clearly that what is being shown is little more than a mock-up, executives of all levels and technical skill, all the way down to managers just above myself, all understand that a very thin and scripted demo is not anything close to a finished product.
Describing the demo as a "house of cards" that will collapse with a single misstep gets the point across nicely, while also giving the demo audience an eyeful of what can be accomplished if everything is handled appropriately.
Demos are carefully scripted and rehearsed, values are hard-coded, and absolutely nothing exists that does not prop up the demo for the purposes of the script and the talking points.
It is hard to describe to someone who hasn't written an application demo like this just how little actually exists behind the UI.
Anyway, my point is that if you choose the correct words, anyone can understand that it's like a painting of an application, and not an actual application, just like a painting of your mother is not actually your mother.
For me, the purpose of the "demo" is to get agreement on specifications and to remove ambiguities. This can also be used to reassure that the requirements of the client have been well understood.
I currently do the opposite and I think it's the right way. Do the part that can provide quick validation first. Usually that's the front-end. You can find out if you're making the right thing pretty fast that way.
What are they going to do? Fire me? I can go anywhere. They can't find me anywhere.
When you do, it can easily confuse folks who aren't deeply involved in your project ("haven't I seen this already?") and can hurt team morale because they never get a "shipped it" moment that feels good.
More to the point: enforcing this rule incentivizes teams to build things in small, shippable components. Nobody wants to be left out of demo day multiple weeks in a row.