As Evan Robinson explains in his article, Why Crunch Mode Doesn’t Work, the notion of “crunch time” was thrown away a long time ago in the industrial sector. Unfortunately, it now exists in the software development industry and might even be the norm.
I think the reasons for the prevalence of this practice in software come from the fact that the software development industry is relatively young compared to, say, car manufacturing, and hasn’t yet gained the same type of wisdom and efficiency. In software, people are still concerned with what can be done and getting it done instead of how best to do it. Best practices and optimization really haven’t hit the software industry as a whole and so there are still broken assumptions that practices like crunch time are necessary to produce good software.
As with many other mistakes in the software industry, crunch time is a result of poor planning and a lack of understanding of the overall process. If your team has to spend two or three weeks at the end of every product cycle scrambling to get things done for the release, either there are too many features or the ship date wasn’t realistic for all of the standard parts of the development process that must be completed. Failing to schedule things like proper debugging time or details of necessary features lead to unrealistic ship dates and thus unrealistic demands from management to meet unrealistic ship dates.
Crunch time is not a necessary evil in software, but rather an extremely common side effect of poor planning and a lack of proper management in a fledgling industry. If you normally end up with two weeks of crunch time, build in two or three weeks of buffer time in every schedule and you’ll start to hit your targets without slave driving your programmers. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that these practices drop the quality of the product and the morale of the employees — only a late nineteenth-century industrial supervisor.
Crunch time is similar to “tax season” where CPA’s have an April 15th deadline to complete all tax returns. If you hire too many accountants during this time, layoffs are inevitable in post tax season which is poor for morale. Too few and the hours are unbearable. CPAs still haven’t figured out how to handle the workload because clients inevitably bring in important documents last minute and expect their returns to go out on time. The best is when family calls you on April 15th at about 5:00 p.m. with a tax question. People are procrastinators…that is all there is to it!