I've been watching a series following the training of the Royal Marines. One of the corporals made the comment that their standards are very high for a reason. They will do everything possible to help the recruits meet those standards but those standards will not be lowered under any circumstances.

They know they are being tough but do be anything else does the recruits no favours. If the bar is lowered then a Royal Marine would be a danger to themselves and, more importantly, a danger to their comrades. Those high standards are why the Royal Marines are an elite group and highly respected.

I've often wished this attitude prevailed in software development. Set high, uncompromising standards to which IT staff have to deliver. Relaxing those standards will have a knock on effect that will be detrimental to the deliverable and return to bite them and their colleagues in the bum.

You may not think this is practical but my personal experience is that the time spent bug-fixing after deployment is far greater than the time spent being a stickler for quality. More and more time is spent coding around buggy and tech debt riddled releases on each subsequent releases.

In my career I can think of only a couple of occasions when the deadline for delivery was truly important enough that it had to be released come what may. The rest have been arbitrary deadlines to allow a manager to claim a bonus. Said managers would accept almost anything in order to get their bonus knowing that the next quarters objectives would have absolutely nothing to do with the software they had just signed off. Someone else would become responsible for the freshly delivered turd and they would get away scot free.

Test your software as if a bug found after deployment would be a proven slur on your bedroom prowess.

Stop complaining and (as the Marines say) "man up princess".