My First Agile Project: The Last Mile

Originally published on AgileSoftwareDevelopment.com

Welcome back to My First Agile Project. I spent a few weeks doing as little as possible but now that I’m back at work we’re starting to head toward the actual end of this project. For real this time; barring any natural disasters, stress-induced insanity, or alien invasions we should be live by the end of the month. So the next couple of posts in this series are going to be about the end of My First Agile Project as we complete this and transition to whatever comes next.

As I’ve discussed before, we’ve missed a couple of other deadlines in the past but this one just feels different. On past deadlines, when we thought we were close enough to done we’d find a 3-day weekend and try to decide if we could finish everything by then (converting all of our old data takes a long time so we have to basically shut the company down while we do it). Of course, things come up and we’re too optimistic so when it comes down to it we’ve had to abandon the previous dates. We thought we were going to be able to do it at the end of November but again we missed it due to changes being made at the last minute and unforeseen problems. This time though, our list of remaining issues is small enough that when we decided on this new date we were all a lot more comfortable with it than in the past. This feels like an actual date of completion for everything, not a deadline we’re rushing to meet.