Trying till the last minute?

In 2017, we were working for a release which was due on a Friday. It was Thursday evening, but still we were behind at work and we could complete only up to 80% of our work. Developers were struggling to finish their tasks and testers were eagerly waiting to test the application. Even at the last moment what I noticed was our developers are technically capable in every aspect and they never give-up even it was too late to try and check the feasibility of some of the flows. But, even after 12.30p.m., we were not confident enough to release the application. Because we found a few more bugs and still few user stories were not completed.

The next day we had our demonstration to our product owner, who was a Norwegian person. Embarrassingly, at the start of the demonstration we had to mention that we couldn’t complete few user stories. Since we were not prepared for it, the demonstration went worse. Even at the demonstration we found few issues and some of the flows were totally broken. Finally, customer was very disappointed and shouted at us saying that “where were you during last two weeks, didn’t you realize that you cannot deliver all the tasks, why couldn’t you inform me before the demo?” The sad thing was he didn’t want to praise our effort that we put until the last minute. That day, as a team, we failed and ended up with a big disappointment.

But later at the retrospect we really wanted to see where it went wrong.Was it because of wrong planning, wrong estimations or was it because of our incapability.We questioned from ourselves. Then we realized, there can be mistakes in the planning, in the estimations. But the most critical mistake we’ve done was, we haven’t communicated the situation on time. It’s obvious we will find technical issues in the middle of the sprint. Sometimes team members can fall sick. But as long as we have communicated the situation at the right time, clients won’t experience bad surprises at the demonstration. Also, their expectation is set beforehand.

From that day on wards apart from daily updates, at the middle of the sprint we communicate with our client regarding the difficulties which can obstruct the delivery. Then come to an agreement for which extend we can complete the task for the current sprint. Also, based on the situation if we cannot complete a task within the sprint still we inform that to the client as soon as possible.

This very little change helped us to avoid client disappointments thereafter.