Several years ago, I left a dinner table of colleagues wishing a question had gone unasked. We were having dinner before a big release which included a major migration for a business unit, and a product manager said something like ‘This is like the night before the big game to you guys, right?”
I sat upright, and launched into, what was, to me, an impassioned motivational speech about comparing a multi-year software project’s final deployment to a game where the likelihood of success stood around 50%. I think it’s very important to keep in mind that modern engineering requires at least a 90% delivery probability, if not 100%. Sports is a competition whose mechanics can be good metaphor, but whose outcomes probably can’t. Continue reading “Bad Metaphors”