Hidden milestones

Recently on my current project, we had a defect raised by the customer that actually turned out to be a feature they had requested at the very beginning. My boss was amused, but all I thought was “well, it’s about time”. It seems I am cynical enough to regard “Customer logs feature as a defect” as a project milestone. It got me thinking about some other “hidden” project milestones.

Basically, if these milestones don’t occur, I start to feel a bit anxious and start to wonder what’s the matter with the project. MSF’s “zero bug bounce” is one of those milestones – the expectation that the bug count will go up again after it’s hit zero for the first time.

Here’s a few more:

  • Complete or partial GUI redesign
  • Customer requests urgent feature that they forgot at the start of the project
  • Environmental fault blocks test progress

Anyone got any more?