It was almost Christmas, I was living in London and had just started dating my wife-to-be. We’d booked a week travelling through Spain and Morocco for the the Christmas period and were looking forward to a wonderful adventure.

I had been leading a team developing a project for Argos (like the The Warehouse) and it was going into UAT (User Acceptance Testing) in early December. We were almost out of budget but the app had been thoroughly tested so we were confident it would go smoothly. And we were so wrong…

As soon as we started UAT we discovered that the users had data entry requirements that we hadn’t considered. We also discovered that our data modelling was wrong, and had to make database schema changes which meant changing code, which introduced bugs into previously tested code. Our code quality plummeted, we didn’t have time to test, and the whole thing spiralled out of control. The team and I were working insane hours, under pressure from our account manager, the client’s PM, the end users and the Big Boss.

By the time I boarded the plane for Spain I had a nervous twitch in my eye which would last for the whole holiday. I was anxious and irritable and couldn’t relax. It marred what was otherwise a very special time.

I’d experienced UAT-hell before, but this was the worst. After that I decided that I would never put myself through it again. And in the six years since then I’ve always managed to steer clear of those sorts of disasters.

Which is why I really like the part of Agile that calls for monthly deliverables with early engagement with end uses. I found on a recently completed Agile project that each showcase was painful - Jo would be merciless to us if something which we had told her to showcase didn’t work. And the last week would always be a scramble and final release would usually go down to the wire – in one case the deployment for the showcase was 3 minutes before the showcase.

But it meant that there were several small, manageable, difficult moments during the project, rather then one big impossible one at the end. And with Christmas approaching, that might be something to consider...