A team I'm coaching just now is making an effort to embrace sound software engineering practices as part of implementing agile and lean thinking in their work. It happens that the story of Xiang Yu came up on the Scrum Development mailing list today, and it resonated with me. Team members were struggling with the tension between delivering their customary number of story points versus taking the time to remediate missing unit tests and adding customer acceptance tests, which would reduce their velocity temporarily. I would not take Xiang Yu as a role model generally, but one of his exploits suggests a practical approach to embracing new practices:
[During the Chu-Han civil war, in] 208 BC while Xiang Yu and Liu Bang were planning the capture of the Qin capital Xian Yang, an urgent message came from the city of Julu, which had been under siege for nearly a month by Qin troops. A large army was sent to relieve Julu with Xiang Yu as second in command under the veteran political leader Song Yi.
When the troops got to Anyang, Song Yi ordered them to stop. He wanted to wait while the Qin army would exhaust themselves. They camped in the cold wet weather for forty-six days and the troops were short of food. Xiang Yu was furious because Song Yi ignored the suffering of the soldiers. The next morning during a conference with Song Yi, Xiang Yu jumped up and killed him. The generals were in awe and elected him their leader.
The vanguard of Xiang Yu’s army [was] unable to raise the siege, so Xiang Yu sent his entire force into battle. After crossing the river Zhang, Xiang Yu ordered all boats sunk, and after three-day supply was prepared, all cooking pots were smashed, giving the troops no choice but to go forward.
After Xiang Yu’s troops raised the siege and the Qin generals had surrendered to him, he went on to conquer a vast territory covering five former states.
(Source: http://kongming.net/novel/han/xiangyu.php)
If you're serious about improving your software engineering practices, then kill your inner Song Yi and burn your boats. Take only enough with you for the battle at hand (commit to what you will deliver next and focus on that). Let there be no retreat to hacking, no retreat to crystal-balling. The only way forward is forward.
