• 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.

    This is one reason why I like to log *everything*.

    User: "Hey, when's project wombat going live <bigwig> is asking I'll have to tell him the delay's with you"

    Dev: "When you've tested it"

    User: "Oh that's done"

    Dev: "Funny that - the log says you've done none"

    User "You're SPYING on us?!"

    Dev: "Aye - I'd bear that in mind ... "

    (redacted version of actual conversation - there was language Steve J would take me to task for posting here)

    I'm a DBA.
    I'm not paid to solve problems. I'm paid to prevent them.