The mysterious case of the missing feature

True story; a few years ago I decided to redo the bathroom. It was a pretty big project and I let the professionals handle it and left on holiday for 2 weeks while the bathroom company handled things.

When I came back, the light in the brand new bathroom was on. The whole thing looked super good and professionally made. I was impressed. Then I noticed something. How do you turn off the lights? I spend a bit of time looking for the off switch but it, mysteriously, was missing. I called the architect and he was baffled. He looked at his drawing and said "Yeah well, seems I did forget to put that on the schematics". Next day everything was fixed (I guess you could sell this as an agile methodology and yeah, in some cases this would certainly be acceptable).

This got me thinking. There were 3 guys working on that renovation. Nobody noticed that there was no off switch? They just left and let the light on? Did they think an always-on-light was requested by the client? These guys are all super professionals, yet they were all glad the work was done and went home.

As most of you know, this is quite common in IT projects, but the fact that this happened in, what I thought was a super mature and very quantifiable (as opposed to our more ethereal software component boundaries) manufacturing industry was a bit of a surprise.

What is the morale of the story here? As an architect, you are always responsible for the end product but you are also responsible to make sure that the team understands what is being delivered, what the business case is and why architecture decisions were made. If we really want to make the shift-left a reality, everybody needs to be involved and, more importantly, needs to feel involved. No matter how good your team mates are (those bathroom guys are really highly skilled in their respective fields), they still need to be in the loop.

There would have been no problem if somebody had said "Wait a minute, the architect forgot a light switch here, I will let them know right away". That is the team you want and the culture you need to promote.

And don't forget:

Test early and often