OK, here’s the plan. Anyone who wants to answer the following question with a comment is eligible for the prize. The winner will be chosen at random from valid, thoughtful answers starting on Tuesday evening. The prize will be your choice of:

• The Mythical Man-Month by Fred Brooks
• More Joel on Software by Joel Spolsky
• Peopleware by Tom DeMarco
• Rapid Development: Taming Wild Software Schedules by Steve McConnell
• Leaving one (and only one :) ) celebratory bragging comment saying that indeed, you are simultaneously a talented and lucky person

If you don’t want to leave your full name, just make sure that I can get back to or identify you via the email you put down (which is not shown on the page.) I think this will be an interesting exercise to see where potential delays are and to start a dialog on where we can try to remove delays in our processes. The description talks about code, but your answers don’t have to be limited to it.

Imagine that you had a magic wand that removed delays in your work. In other words, you’d do things the same way, but when you needed someone, they’d immediately be available. Perhaps your specifications or work description would be ready for the next task right when you got done implementing your current feature. What would happen if you didn’t have to wait for feedback from test or customers? In other words, as soon as code was written, you knew whether it worked or not. As soon as code was written and tested, a customer would tell you if it was what they wanted or not.

So the questions to answer are:

• What delays would you remove? If you had to pick one, what would it be?
• What would achieving this do for your productivity?
• What is currently in the way of achieving this?