Software crisis management

The date has been given three times, and I no longer believe any of them.

You have been given it three times, and the question is no longer when it ships but which of them to believe.

The team is working, tickets are closing, reports arrive. Nothing ships. Nobody can walk the product from the first step to the last and say it is ready — so readiness gets argued as an opinion.

The first days are not code. Recover the picture: what was intended, what was built, where the gap between them runs. Until the gap is named, every fix lands by guess.

One question against everything else: what prevents us from going live tomorrow. Not "what else needs doing" — that list is endless — but what specifically stands in the way of the first release.

Separate what will matter in a year from what is needed at launch. Usually it turns out the team has been honestly and competently building the thing that does not open the door, and that is where the weeks went.

Cut. Some of what was built is cheaper to remove than to finish. It is the most unpleasant part of the conversation and the fastest in result.

One end-to-end path that shows readiness. And a date that holds, because it was set by what stands in the way rather than by the size of the backlog.

Eight people had spent eight months on the system. Backend, admin panel, a courier app — precious metals under state traceability, where every operation has to reconcile. The demo to management slipped week after week.

I came in on 17 June. The first end-to-end run was on 30 June. From 1 July the machine was working, restocked by a live courier.

Fourteen days. Eighty percent of the code written by then was removed rather than finished.

A promise that everything planned ships. The first release will be narrower than the plan — that is the point: it ships.

And not a replacement for the team. The team stays; what changes is what they check readiness against.

Tell me which scenario you would want to show a real user first. If there is no such scenario, that is the diagnosis, and that is where we begin.