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Thursday, 17:30, attending a WebEx call with the Agile transformation team. The topic: majority of teams overcommitting virtually every sprint. The client organization wants to change that, so they can have a better forecast on remaining work, so they can tell their customers what's expected without unpleasant surprises after iterations end. You probably know the drill. The word of the day, for some time now, is Predictability: at the start of the iteration tell us, using your past performance, how much do you safely feel you can complete. This is Agile 101 - plan according to velocity.

Well, parallel processes are a funny thing. On my drive back home, and while I am connected to the weekly WebEx call, suddenly the connection drops. I can hear everyone well, and for some time I had a video feed (which is useless for me anyway as I am driving), however I cannot un-mute myself.

I feel grateful for Charles for pretty accurately describing what I said seconds before the un-mute function failed. And other than that, I feel frustrated and powerless.

During that time everything could have been against me. All the slow drivers prevent me from arriving quicker; the police car near-by prevents me from pulling over and trying to fix the connection, etc.

I guess that if I had not had that understanding about what was going on for me, these emotions could have overtaken me. This was reality for me.

Luckily for me, I don't. The moment I understand that the "knot" in my stomach, the sensation that all my nerves are tickling me was sign of what's going on for me in the Here and Now.

On January 17th, 2008, BA flight 38 approached landing at London Heathrow airport. During its final approach one of the engines stopped. Shortly after, the second engine stopped too. At the moment when the pilots needed to increase thrust for their final approach towards the runway, the huge flying metal object became a weight dropping from the sky. The plain crashed about 300 metres from the runway. Miraculously only 47 people were injured (the worst injury was a broken limb) and there were no fatalities. As in any flight incident, the crash was investigated, and possible reasons were eliminated one by one. Pilots fuel operation fault, shortage of fuel, fuel pipes blockage - all were overruled. Finally investigators had one last hypothesis: when flying over the arctic, a fairly new route at the time, fuel flow was blocked due to humidity in the fuel freezing into ice crystals. They had no proof, since by the time of the crash all ice was melted. But this was their best bet. 

Although this is not the typical topic in a software team retrospective, the way airlines and aircraft makers handle incidents is indeed relevant for us.