Casting Adrift

It's amazing how quickly we forget what problems we used to have and why we were doing certain things. It's kind of like the schitzo who gets on meds, starts feeling better and decides they don't need meds anymore and stops taking them, then gets crazy again.

We relaxed our SCRUM structure when going into the final bug fix stage. It was going OK for a while, then management (who have between barely and never worked with the product) had the hubris to exclude all developers and all testers (including the leads) from the triage process. Needless to say, all progress came to a screeching halt, important issues were being ignored, and most of the staff started reading the newspaper. With all my newly found free time I used my powers of inductive reasoning to evaluate all tasks left for release/support/maintenance (client data load, disaster recovery plans, dry run installs, etc.) and inquired what the overall release plan was.

Answer: Well, we're going to release it, see what happens, then decide what to do.

No f*@#ing wonder every other product release here has been a disaster.

So we're reinstituting the backlog and sprint cycle with everything we know will have to be done. I'm betting it takes management about two more weeks before they realize they're chasing their tails since freezing out the product staff. Hopefully they'll get on board at that point and help get this product out the door.