Information Technology Dark Side

So, yesterday afternoon I finally put my hero sword through Ganondorf’s skull (if you don’t know, I haven’t blogged much in the last month or so because I’ve been playing The Legend of Zelda – Windwaker on the Nintendo GameCube and Ganondorf is the arch-enemy of peace, happiness, and prosperity). And I mean that literally – the winning swordplay move of the game is to drive your sword to its hilt in the bad guys skull. Since he doesn’t have a neck, it pretty much goes down into the body cavity from there. My 7-year old daughter made the comment she was glad they didn’t show any blood. My three year old son, on the other hand, just gave me exuberant high fives and said “Let’s play it again.” I don’t think so. At least, not until I get a Wii and Twilight Princess. It might be a while.

So, in various agile project management approaches like Scrum and FDD, there is a time after each burst of activity to pause and reflect on the things you learned and identify ways you can be more effective. Some people call this lessons learned, I like to call them heartbeats. So, here’s my Zelda heartbeat.

Lesson #1: Pay attention to the instructions at the beginning of the game!
I tried, unsuccessfully, to defeat Ganondorf for about two days before I determined the skills I had were not enough to do the job. Then I remembered a brief training session with an old geezer who was a master at swordplay in the early stages of the game, and I realized there were skills he had taught I had never incorporated into my skill set. So, I started a new game and played just enough to go back to the old geezer and learn the skills again. He taught me to use the parry attack, a combination of rolling and stabbing that looks cool but is really easy to do if you know how to do it. Crap! Suddenly I realized I had been doing everything the hard way. Everything! There were tons of creatures I had struggled to fight because I hadn’t mastered a basic skill.

Today, I had to make a confession to a project team. I had screwed up. I had ignored a factor early on in the project that resulted in me delivering functionality that was not what had been promised. I could have dealt with it early on, but it seemed insignificant to me at the time and I didn’t bother testing my assumption that it wasn’t important.

Two months ago, I made the same mistake on another project.

I’m sensing a pattern here. I need to test my assumptions more aggressively. Fortunately, none of these mistakes caused real harm. Ganondorf is still dead, and my projects are still being finished as promised. But they took longer than I wanted them too, and it was because I screwed up.

Lesson #2: Make sure you test all reasonable options before you give up
There is a stage in Wind Waker where you have to collect a bunch of charts (maps) then follow them to find a treasure called the Triforce of Courage. I had found a map to the maps, and had even found my way to the point where the maps were hidden, but had become stuck in the treasure room, where symbols on the floor marked the treasure but didn’t indicate how to reveal it. I tried everything I could think of, except a very basic trick I had been using since the beginning of the game. Why didn’t I try it? Because I thought I had already tried it with no effect. The trick involved conducting a song called the Wind Aria while standing on a symbol of the wind. I wandered all over the Zelda world for at least five hours before I gave up and googled it (one of the great shames of gameplay is needing to go to the internet to solve a puzzle). What an idiot. I had tested every other song. Why I didn’t do that one is beyond me.

Recently I supported the resolution of an emergency outage of a system. In the process, we identified several possible theories for the cause of the problem. I kept a list, and we made sure we tested every one of them. In the end, the simplest explanation seemed to be the right one, and we had specific tests identified to support that. At least I don’t always make the same mistake over and over again!

Lesson #3: Video games are a fun way to hang out with your kids.
Video games are more socially engaging than movies and television programs. Even my wife, who dislikes video games, is tickled watching my kids tell me what to do. She even seems a little interested in the Wii… Just maybe, one of these days… Well, at least I can hope!

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