Benefit of Headlights

There is a reason to burn headlights when driving at night and to slow down when driving in fog. Headlights allow you to anticipate the need for changes in direction earlier and therefore achieve faster flow with no loss in caution. In the fog, you need to slow down precisely because you can’t see as far. It’s helpful to see the shape of the next bend in the road. It’s helpful to know approximately how far it is to our next planned turn or stop. You can benefit from knowing where you might stop for a meal or a night’s lodging.

The same is true in software development. You can go faster when you can see further than the work right in front of you. You can strategize ways to incorporate the bigger picture. You can avoid painting yourself into a corner, far from the door you want to go through.

And if you’re meeting a hard deadline, you might have better options than developing User Stories in prioritized order until you run out of time. In the case where what you want to build won’t fit into the time available, you might do better to add some polish on what you deliver, rather than maximizing functionality. This will give the user an impression of work that’s been finished rather than merely stopped. It’s the equivalent of turning down a side road to a comfortable hotel instead of spending the night in the backseat of a car on the shoulder of the road.

If a development team can benefit from seeing a few weeks ahead, you can imagine that the larger organization around that team would like to see even further. Some of this desire may be due to artificial but customary rhythms, such as annual budget cycles. Such things are likely hard to change in corporations and likely impossible for government organizations. Even if you can be successful in changing the rhythm, it will take time to do so. And that is time the organization would like you to use in developing systems for use or sale. Beyond that, there are rhythms based on a more substantial basis, such as the amount of time it takes to do related work, the changing of the seasons, or planetary ephemera. And when the CEO asks what’s coming up, the CIO would like to have a satisfactory answer.