Last Friday I was informed we needed to ship a fix on that day. That was a tight schedule given the long process we have for releasing software. But this was to fix a high priority problem. So I forged ahead.The project manager left for the day before we could get the release ready. So he asked the software development team lead to release it instead. The dev team lead wanted to leave too. So this task got deleted to me. I agreed since this was a high priority problem.
Given the rush to ship out that fix, it caused delays for shipping this week's planned release. I tried as best I could to keep things moving through our process. However this time when the project manager decided to leave before the release was ready, I said I needed to go too because I worked this weekend.
As I left I assumed the dev team lead would release today's delivery, but I could not be sure. It is one thing to make an exception and take over project management responsibility in emergencies. But I did not want to make a habit of it. Unfortunately the dev team lead got stuck with releasing a whole lot of other software today too. Let's hope he did have to pull an all nighter.
