Every once in a while, we get a request out of the ordinary, and just sometimes we take the challenge. This is a story about one of those times when two men delivered a baby in 4.5 months. Figuratively.

Almost everyone working in software development eventually gets familiar with Brooks’s law. Another way of putting it is

Hence the figure of speech above. There are exceptions, of course, and this is one of them.

To conquer the unknown, of course. Long story short, we were given an opportunity to help out on a project that was late before we even started. The details were scarce, the job was on-site with the client at the other end of Europe, and the deadlines were just around the corner. After a quick round of negotiations, the deal was set: two men for four days, working on a big app that was yet to be released to the public.

Skipping ahead to the end – well, it worked. We gave the project a much needed push in the right direction and set the grounds for working on it from back home. Looking back, I don’t think I ever doubted we would pull it off, despite the odds looking grim on paper.

So, why the lack of concern, and even more important, why did things work out well?

For starters, a lot of mobile apps are in the scope of 1-2 developers to handle. Usually a single developer should be competent enough to handle an average app by himself, not including the API or other components outside of the application. This was the case here as well, with most of the work being done by a single developer, so initial project assessment took a negligible amount of time.

There was also the pressure to do what we were hired to do. Some people don’t respond well to increased pressure and lack of time, but in our case this probably added the much needed sense of urgency.

Isolation and focus can boost productivity drastically. Working on-site, with very little to worry about other than the project at hand, we could afford to concentrate completely on a single task that needed to be done at that moment.

Experience was also a key factor. This wasn’t our first rodeo, so we knew exactly how to handle certain situations. It was just a matter of coding the right solution and not wasting time on figuring it out.

After working on the project on-site with the client, I brought it back home to work on it full time. There were quite a few hurdles to overcome with the combination of working on-site and working remotely, but it essentially boiled down to these:

The last one is probably the least significant for this article, but sometimes the simplest advice is the best advice.