I had a relatively pleasant taxi ride back home on Sunday. By relatively pleasant I mean the lack of traffic, the general end-of-season -ness in the air and, the slightly distracting cool wind that drafted in and out through the windows which allows one to think thoughts in solitude and peace.

And, I thought about the project that we've been undertaking for the past couple of years.

When we did begin to draw up the scope or, vision about what we wanted to achieve it was mostly at the stage of "this should be done because it needs to be done". That is an ideal scratchpad to start with. And, it provided the impetus to go through repeated stages of iterations and prototypes each time enabling us to demonstrate potential if not capabilities. Along the way we played around with software development processes, workflows and the ability to measure our own success against our own remorseless benchmarks. When you don't specifically have anything to measure yourself against, the best possible way is to set a brutal and punishing schedule and hope to hell that you end up doing a stellar job. The trick is that while you are hoping to hell, you work diligently towards building up the nuts and bolts capabilities to indeed end up over-performing. Along side a few catastrophic and comical failures by the side, it did allow us to luxury of getting things done. And, it allowed us a tremendous joy - identifying and hiring what we can probably now say is a good team working in cadence towards getting things pushed out of the door in a remarkably well rounded way.

However, this wasn't what I was thinking about. I was thinking about how we've adopted and evolved the various software development processes to ensure that our work was more visible and much more 'smart'. In the early days it was along the lines of ensuring that we have smaller improvements to show. Now, when things have become a bit more mature and, there is actual consumption of services and tools - it has become imperative to adapt newer ways of achieving the same results - high quality of work with resultant high visibility. 

Visibility is a double edged game. It can make you feel like a deer in headlights or, it can make you feel like the one under the spotlight turning in a virtuoso performance. Which is why at each stage there has been debate about the upsides and more importantly how it affects the rhythm within the team. It hasn't been one of the happier moments when cadence was lost or, productivity took a hit. But I'd rather reflect on the wonderful times when things clicked together and came to produce results that were desired and above expectations.

Anyways, the sum total of the rambling so far was to elaborate on the fact that attempting to avoid ruminating excessively on the downsides of an equation and instead focusing on the positives/upsides does lead to a good result.