Tuesday 29 June 2010

Well and Truly De-scoped

I have just spent about month working on the current release that we are doing. Now a large section of the release was always going to be in doubt because of a potential "management change" that was on the cards. Well the change happened and the mandatory change was scrapped by the new managers. Oh well we said isn't that bad as we have less things to run and there is still plenty of other bits of the release. Apart from that this piece of work had not really been thought through, above all this would mean of course Test Dude would do his De-scope dance and have less work to do!

So today I Logged into the defect meeting conference and the TM announced that that the other large section of work that was supposed to be in this release has now been pushed into the next release because they are simply having problems building it! There then followed a rather long conversation about how to back out the code for the now junked mandatory release."Why cant we just switch it off" asked one of the business analysts "Err its a little bit more trickier than that" squeaked a rather apologetic developer who sounded like he very much wanted to be somewhere else. Anyway after a half an hour of tooing and froing about environments they decided to scrap the defect meeting and have a re plan meeting sometime later. I had been enjoying watching the crows hop about outside my window, but was rather glad the meeting had finished. The release co-ordinator gathered the troops for our own meeting, along with the release co-ordinator for the next release who was tempted along with the false promise of choccie biscuits

Much later when we managed to revive the poor old Release coordinator for next release ( who had gone all the shades of white and fainted on the announcement) we sat about and thought what it meant for the currently release. All the tests we had run would have to be scrapped and re-run in the new environment that was being built. Yep lots of on the hoof planning, just the way we like it huh uh huh.

The only shades of light is that we have done all the hard work for the stuff that has been dumped into the next release. It will mean that we will have an extra couple of hundred scripts to churn through though. I went back to my desk and watched the crows fight over scraps and contemplated holidays and any new job that doesnt involve testing.

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