It's urgent. It's emergent. It's the end of the world!
Get it out now. Right now. No. Now's too late. Get it out then.
I call it the "product pee-pee dance", where an organization hops from foot to foot until they push a product out to production, whether it's ready or not.
I don't see this all the time but I see it a lot of the time.
Depending on how liberal you want to be when selecting for this phenomenon, it seems like it's happening in somewhere between one- and three-quarters of the organizations I've seen.
Why? Where's the urgency?
Sometimes it's real. Maybe there's a critical defect that is causing an app to hemorrhage customers. Maybe a real security hole has been identified and you're in a race against the clock to close it before the bad guys can find it.
Sometimes, it's a false urgency stemming from another problem. Some really common sources are misunderstandings about why Agility makes an organization faster, artificial scarcity, and an unpredictable code base.
The danger of false urgency is that people will often make compromises that aren't really helpful because of it. These compromises typically aren't even helpful in the short-run but it can't be helped. It's human nature. Most people will take the shortcut through the brier patch every time they feel an urgency.
If you have one emergency release every now and then, it's probably okay to do the pee-pee dance. When you've gotta go, you've gotta go.
If you go through the product pee-pee dance with alarming regularity, there might be another problem...
You should probably get that checked out.
