Tortoise and Hare, and Monkey Wins!!!

A Hare one day make jokes about the Project plans and change control documents of the Tortoise. He challenged tortoise, “I will beat you in a race to deliver working software.” Both agreed that the Fox (VP of Product Management) should choose requirements and define the release. On a particular day, both started race together. The tortoise never stopped for a moment, and went on with a slow and steady build cycle straight to the end. The Hare, trusting to his native widgets and skills, cared little about unit testing and user feedback, and lying down at his desk after long night coding, fell asleep very fast. At last, waking up, and logging on as fast as he could, he saw the Tortoise had reached goal, and was demoing to the Fox.

Let’s not stop here and continue…

By the time, the Hare caught up with the Fox, he saw the Tortoise shut her laptop and slump away. He asked for an explanation, “Why didn’t tortoise win?” The Fox explained that what the Tortoise delivered was very late to the market and the requirements were also out of date. “But”, the Fox said, “Happily for all, the Monkey has delivered working software that meets most of our customer’s high priority needs!”

“Monkey??? Where the hell did the Monkey come from?” exclaimed Hare.

“Ah yes,” sighed the Fox, “While you were crashed out under your desk, the Monkey came and delivered a working prototype. I told her that it wasn’t quite right so the Monkey went away and came back a little while later with a revised prototype. It took a few tries but eventually the Monkey got it right and won the race. In fact the Monkey’s working prototypes helped me understand what I was asking for. You see when I gave the requirements to you and the Tortoise, there were a few stories I missed and during the race a new competitor entered the market. Even if you hadn’t fallen asleep you would not have won as I had to keep moving the goal. Our customer, Mr. Zeno, is a hard man to please!”

Story ends here with few observations for each character:

For Hare – lost the race because his development process, starts out fast and light but never stops to get feedback – one big long sprint, a lot of code written, little of it is ever used. Often the first movers are stuck building their software on immature technology that becomes obsolete before it is finished.

For Tortoise – lost the race because slow and steady hasn’t been a winning strategy for a long time now, the goal keeps moving. Like explained in Zeno, Achilles can’t catch up to the Tortoise because every time Achilles reaches the spot where the Tortoise was, the Tortoise has moved on. This is the problem of accomplishing an infinite number of tasks in a finite amount of time and thus are never finished.

For Monkey – won the race because he used an Agile development process. Every project has a never ending number of bugs and feature requests. First the Monkey took a prioritized subset of from the list of infinite tasks and delivered them to the Fox as working software. It was rough but the Fox had the results and plenty of time to give feedback and course corrections. Second the Monkey kept repeating these short sprints of implementing the high priority tasks and getting feedback on a real working system so that, as the goal moved she could quickly change the course. The Monkey did the development process right, treats every sprint as a whole, where no dichotomies are created.

The software is released to the user, it does what it does, feedback is gathered, and the process is repeated until a winner is declared.