Question

Your QA team that has prescribed a set of procedures to be followed by the project team whenever a modified code/patch/application is released to the client. Your Project Lead informs that a release is required urgently by an important client. He says, all the steps in the procedure prescribed have been followed but due to time constraints each step is covered only to the extent of 30-50%. Further, the client needs the release in the next 2 hours itself. What will be your decision? Allow or not to allow the release? Why?

Also, discuss the importance of an action plan to ensure the issue doesn’t occur again. Note the importance of your internal quality and how to manage issues when the customer requirements require a need to deliver sooner. You are the contractor, how could you improve future performance? Could an external quality auditor assist in future time concerns?

Answer 1

I would not allow the release in this case because it believe that a release that will create issues is even worse than no release to production at all. As each step has been covered 30-50% I would not deploy the code to production and I would also like to have a conversation with the client and make them understand the situation and the impact that it may hsave on the deployment and may disrupt existing functionalities as well.

I would also make the team learn from such situations and make them aware that such situations should not happen, because if the time limit is very less, we may have to have a system that is automated and possess regession suites as well which will test the existing functionalities even after the change is incorporated. The organization should ensure that even if the process is automated, quality should be maintained or else it may effect the performance and effectiveness of the organization to a great extent

This is a very critical situation is common in the corporate world especially in IT where the requirement is quite dynamic in nature and there is also emergency requirement to release and deploy the change in production environment. As development is important because development leads to change and modification in the code and development is followed by rigorous testing which is the Quality and Assurance aspect where the quality of the code is measured. I believe that without a complete certification from QA code changes should not be released and in this case when as the project manager I am aware that the QA is not complete, I will make sure that the code is not released because it may happen that the code affects the existing functionality which may lead to quite and issue in production and also disrupt the client process. In this case I will take this decision for the betterment of the relation because if the code is not QA certified then there is a big risk of deploying it to production hence I will be conveying the same to the client and make them aware of the risks and will also convey that as the project manager I cannot afford to take this risk which may actually affect the reputation of the team as well as of the organization.