Our client has a dedicated testing team. They discovered a critical bug in our latest release of new functionality. They declared that they were unable to proceed with their tests. And they issued a trouble ticket of the highest priority.At 3:00 PM today the project manager said we needed to ship a fix to this problem today. This was problematic since it normally takes about 8 hours to release software for us even when we know what code changes need to be sent out.
The development team went into emergency mode. Some of us discussed ways to just hack together a fix to remove the high priority problem at the expense of breaking other things in the application. That felt like a waste of time because they would discover the other problems soon enough. Luckily the developer whose code was having trouble had a breakthrough. We did have to remove some of the new functionality. But at least we did not have to break anything.
I tried to stay clear of this problem because I was not in the mood to be at work until 10 or 11 PM. To my amazement, the fix got released in just over 3 hours. It was only later that I realized how this acceleration occurred - they cut corners. Normally all code changes go through a peer review. Skipped. And all new deliveries normally go through independent testing. Skipped. The documentation with the new delivery gets an editorial review normally. Guess what? Skipped. In the end, these shortcuts will have proved worthy if the fix makes it out in time and nothing blows up. I am glad this delivery was not my responsibility. We shall see tomorrow.
