Pre UAT - the notorious professor tactic!

Pre-UAT. Why it cannot be underestimated.

The importance of Pre-UAT is often underestimated. There are quite a few companies which I know which think Pre UAT is a waste of time, thank God it is not my current company. Pre-UAT in my mind is all about getting the customer involved early to deliver the most potential shippable software early. Not months down the line. Really ridiculously early. Why? Because as product builders, often times while building our awesome product using our awesome techniques we forget that the customer is the one who has enabled all this awesomeness for us in the first place. We are the flame. Never forget what sparked us into existence or else we could be extinguished without knowing when and how it happened. Unless off course you are the spark and the flame both.

I thought the best way to describe the benefit of a Pre-UAT is by

giving an example of a notorious professor I had taken a class with in school. He taught

Chemistry and Math. I remember much before the final exams he used to set unofficial internal deadlines pretty much spontaneously on the syllabus he had covered up until that moment. The internal deadlines often did not make sense to us students because they covered partial concepts and partial chapters which were a part of a bigger concept which was not yet comprehended by us yet. Well you must be thinking, how is that any different from a mid term or a surprise test? In my mind the fact that the midterm is a planned exam which happens at a fixed time and date makes it ineffective.

What the notorious professor did was announce a date for a test on the syllabus covered so far, tell us our final grades would be affected by it and then after we had focussed all day everyday until the day of that test on the syllabus he would casually announce in class on the day of the exam that he had cancelled that "life changing" test because of some petty reason. It generally used to leave us hating him and relieved at the same time. What we did not realize was that it made us really ready for whatever was taught until then. If we had to give a final exam with that scoped out syllabus, at that moment, we would kill it! In agile software industry talk, we were truly shippable. We had potentially shippable working software and the beauty of it was that we did not even know it.

Scrum in a subtle way does the same thing. Now ponder over the above paragraph for a minute and send across any questions that might pop up in your mind right this moment without hesitation to sid@sbnation.com.

Bye.