Quality Assurance has been delaying a release for a month and a half. As a consumer facing website, we normally have two code pushes a week. It’s a major rewrite, sure, but at this point we’re at about 20x the bug count of any previous release. The bugs are no longer: “You do this and the site goes down” but more along the lines, “You do something that nobody in their right mind would do and sometimes you get an error message, but everything is fine if you reload the page.”
I guess this is what happens when you promote someone and they get drunk with power.
I’m glad I’m not having to deal with this.
Still overhearing QA’s reason we should continue to bug hunt sounds like a bad Donald Rumsfeld impression:
The Unknown
As we know,
There are known knowns.
There are things we know we know.
We also know
There are known unknowns.
That is to say
We know there are some things
We do not know.
But there are also unknown unknowns,
The ones we don’t know
We don’t know.
(I guess this means we’ll release next year.)
Better is the enemy of done.
Back in 2000, when I moved to the Bay Area, I worked for a Yahoo clone. Our head of QA was this incredibly pompous buffoon who had a degree in linguistics from Princeton. He loved to wax melodramatic about how certain bugs were “show stoppers” forcing us to delay releases. He hired a self-described wunderkind to create elaborate automated tests using Silk or Rational or some other outrageously expensive software. That guy’s job after the bubble burst? Working on vending machines. Fixing the show-stopping bugs that his scripts uncovered usually involved fixing the half-generated, half-hacked VB he “wrote” for the scripts. Ah those were the days!