Cricket vs IT

This article is a figment of my imagination dating back to half a day spent on watching a cricket match. After the game stretched till the last over, it was time for presentation ceremony and any guesses who got the Man-of-the-Match award.  It was a batsman for scoring a century and guiding his team to victory.

Now this struck as a striking resemblance to my profession.  After a successful go-live of a project, it is a developer who often gets credited for being a star performer.

You can search it over the internet and you will find that in the history of cricket, there have been more batsmen winning the Man-of-the-Match award than bowlers. My mind mapped batsmen to developers and bowlers to testers.

Though the base of a team’s success is team effort, there are eye-catchers in every profession. Now let me draw some more comparisons that boggled my mind.

Just like a captain heads a cricket team comprising of batsmen, all-rounders and bowlers; a project manager heads a team of developers, administrators and testers. A captain though has a say in the selection committee’s decision to choose the eleven players on field there could be some changes in the list due to the influence of the committee’s chairman. Likewise though the project manager decides his team members for various modules, there could be insertions and deletions to his team due to the influence of senior project managers. Biasness is tough to accept but a few are bound to lose their well deserved berths against the senior’s favorites.  Well, that is sometimes how the world is!

Now that the team is finally formed, the next common thing is training. No one escapes trainings and upgrades to stay relevant in one’s professional career.While batsmen are tested by bowlers for their competency, the developers get pounded by testers during their preparatory phase.

After all the hard work, one cannot ignore partying to help rejuvenate the tired souls. Bar, pub, discos are centres of relaxation and team building. No wonder there are often cases of brawls outside pub by cricketers or drunk driving cases by IT employees spawning the newspaper’s front page.

Just like a cricket venue could be domestic or international, there could be an offshore or onsite playing field for the IT guys. With the date and venue confirmed, it is time to test the prowess of the teams.

On the day of the match, openers could give a winning start or tumble the top order exposing the competitor to win the game and it is here where the bowlers are expected to minimize the damages of the batsmen by finding faults in the opponent’s batting strokes in a low scoring game. Else the talk of the town would be about the team’s failure attributing to the high bowling averages and poor batting performances.

Similarly, in the field of IT, if developers have exposed flaws big enough for the 3^rd party competitors to catch upon, the testers are reprimanded for not being able to catch them earlier.

Provided all goes well, you arrive at the presentation ceremony and there is similarity here too. The recognition often goes to a batsman or a developer rather than a bowler or a tester. 

I am happy for the turn of events at the closing ceremony of 2015 World Cup held at Melbourne where James Faulkner was adjudged Man-of-the-Match and Mitchell Starc as Player of the Tournament.

An IT field is no different. After a project’s success, it is mostly the developers who are hailed as the top performers or game changers in an award function or in appraisal cycles. But even testers are applauded for out-of-the-ordinary achievements at times.

Nevertheless, no one can deny that the success of either a cricket team or an IT team doesn’t depend on the hard work of a talented group.

Well these are all just my thoughts on the striking similarities between Cricket and IT. Signing off with the slogan - 

May the Best Team Win!!

P.S. I am neither a batsman nor a bowler but just an all-rounder expected to fill the middle order and do my job well without any expectation.