The Professional Buzzkill

I’ve joked occasionally that every software project needs a dedicated “Buzzkill”—someone who balances out the pie-in-the-sky thinking that often hurts these projects.

I do believe that optimism is one of the greatest dangers to most software projects—people being unrealistic about the complexity of things and how long things take to do well. But no project ever gets off the ground without optimism, right? Would any non-technical person ever sponsor a software project if they really took in the full complexity and likelihood of failure that their project (or any project) faces?

So let’s accept the necessity of the optimist. Instead of damning optimism, let’s promote context. Maybe every team needs the “Contextualizer”—the person who places new ideas in context and then encourages discussion in that light.

One of the great triumphs of Scrum is that the product backlog acts as a context for features to land in. Force the product owner to think about all the other stuff they’ve asked the team to do, every single time they have a new request.

I pledge not to shoot your idea down, but I will give it some context!