So much in life requires practice. I do a lot of public speaking. Public speaking is performance. To get beyond bullet points, you need to remember that most of all you are telling a story and giving a performance doing it. Performance requires rehearsal. It needs practice. Sadly, I don't get to do it often enough. Occasionally I have bad performances. The recent webinar for MSF was one of those. I had given the presentation to two sets of executives the week before. However, the same slide deck didn't work for the web audience. What makes it even harder is the web provides for no feedback loop. It's like radio. [You've got admire radio DJ's - particularly talk radio guys.]

Back in 2001, when we launched the Sprint PCS Developers' Conference, I gave one of the main presentations on the first morning. I had all the product and service announcements, following on behind our CTO, Oliver Valente, who announced the network upgrade for PCS Vision. During my presentation Daniel Vacanti came on stage and gave a 20 minute demo. That demo had been rehearsed to the n-th degree. We had presented it 4 times internally at Sprint. In addition to that, the team had scripted the whole demo and timed every mouse movement, and every click. When you have a large audience, at a glamorous developer event, you can't afford for anything to go wrong. And it didn't. The long evenings where Dan sat with other team members while the tracked him with a stop-watch and scripted the event paid off. Rehearsal made every go smoothly on the day.

The following year, my boss did a live demo of a new Java phone in a keynote at JavaOne. The demo failed on stage. It was highly embarrassing. Could a lack of rehearsal been to blame? Maybe.

I wonder how many other aspects of software engineering need rehearsal. How often do we create situations for software engineers to rehearse their actions? How many times in your career has your employer sent you on a boot camp? How many times do you get to build one to "throw away"? Rehearsal is all about being in a position to react appropriately under pressure. It's the basis for cool heads. How many times do software teams get in to trouble and then react in a panic and make the wrong choices, the wrong decision - decisions that make the situation worse?

Uncertainty is out there. We need to train software developers to anticipate it and react calmly when it happens. We need to rehearse more.