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Promising Features to others

Posted on May 17, 2013

Had another great idea come across my desk today that I would love to put into production and push out right away. Newbie Emily would have promised that feature in the next release, scheduled X.Y.Z day, possibly with a smiley face on the end of the mail.

Old grizzled Emily knows better. Old Emily has had too many features postponed or killed by schedules, or management, or politics, or bugs to promise anything to anyone. Here are my 4 basic responses to great ideas now:

  1. That is a nice idea.

    That is it for ideas I have not actually written any code for. No estimates, no, “I want to do that”, no “I’ll try to make that happen”. Give any more than this and someone will end up disappointed when it does not happen.

  2. Let me think about that.

    You will this response if I have actually written the majority or what you are asking for, and have cleared it politically with QA, management, whomever feels they are entitled to make decisions about what I build.

  3. That should be in the next major release.

    You only get this far if I have already landed your feature in trunk/master (depending on your VCS), and our release process is such that we do not have a release branch cherry-picking features from master. Note the complete lack of a time frame on when that release might happen, and the two emphasized weasel words left in statement even at this late stage in the process. Should is there because features can always be removed due to political or technical integration reasons, and major because I need to leave an escape hatch to have a release without the feature (think small emergency bug fixes).

  4. Your feature has been available since version X.Y.Z release DD MMM YY

    That is right, the only way you get a specific time frame from grizzled old Emily is if your feature is already shipping, and preferably has had a few days to settle in and get tested by people who were not necessarily waiting for it, that way if they find bugs I have time to fix them before the person looking forward to said feature (you) get to use it.

It seems a little harsh, but I have been bitten too many times by schedules and politics to promise anything more.