Greg Edwards-268690 (12/18/2014)
Ed Wagner (12/18/2014)
Greg Edwards-268690 (12/18/2014)
Brandie Tarvin (12/18/2014)
So, I'm curious. Anyone have any major projects that people want before the end of the year?We have a business user that keeps asking for X fix, which I already have coded actually. But our SDLC requires the QA team to do thorough testing and none of them have the bandwidth until mid-January, which makes this a February release. None of which stops the BU from asking me if I can put the code into production NOW PLEASE.
What's worse is that he should know better given what impatience has done to his processes before. But some lessons just don't seem to stick.
When something goes into production, expedited and skipping some testing, who is to blame when there are issues?
Likely you, not the business.
So they usually end up with little risk in pushing to short circuit the process.
Business needs to make a case to support more resources at the bottleneck.
All too often, they expect IT to be doing this.
When they actually might be in a better position to quantify benefits to the business.
Hopefully they are part of the QA process, so the more they push, the more they end up being part of the resources needed to speed things up.
They selectively ignore requests for testing, never do the testing they're supposed to do and keep pushing for the production release. When things to awry, they don't know what happened or why things didn't work the way they wanted them to. It's just what they asked for, but not what they wanted. It isn't until later that they say they "didn't have time to test" with the deadline already here. Pay no attention to the fact that they were asking for quotes for new work when they were supposed to be testing.
Documentation of what was expected, what was tested, signoffs, and dates can be helpful.
Or at least help cover your backside.
I remember one IT Director who used to look forward to the follow up to see what went wrong.
Especially when a tested scenario that was signed off on cannot be replicated.
The emergency fix once it was promoted to production soon had to have presidential approval.
And the quality somehow went up quickly.
Not hard to figure that one out.
Yeah, the documentation does cover my backside. It doesn't change the fact that there's a problem in production, but it does help with the political posturing and games that ensue after the problem occurs. I know the political games are a fact of life, but wish they weren't necessary.