BP: 15 Minutes Isn't Enough

One of the pitfalls of the internet era is that we easily forget that communication takes time. Today's case in point has to do with product build announcements. On my current project, the dev team's "practice" is to send email announcing, "We're going to sync & build in X minutes. Don't check in anything until we send email announcing a successful build." (Formerly X was 5 minutes; recently it has trebled to a whopping 15. The fact that the dev team builds on a random schedule is poor practice in the first place.)

The person who does these builds seems to think that everyone receives the email instantaneously and that they will act on the information immediately. As is predictable, however, the builder frequently sends email along these lines, "Everybody stop checking in! I haven't been able to build." or "We will not have a build today because too many checkins occurred after the cut-off."

The problem is that people are not immediately in tune with email in some Borg-like fashion. We need consistent, dependable builds; but we're trying to deliver randomly.