Agile Development vs. Agile Release

You'll have to forgive me for not posting anything for a while. We've been heads-down trying to get this release out the door. And we finally got there. Release-wise, this has to be one of the most relaxed companies I've ever worked for. I've never heard of a four-month QA period prior to release. Where I come from that's a full development cycle. But I digress.

During this period we've had to reconcile our agile development process with a very top-down waterfall release process. Here's a few of the high points:

• You can go from Agile dev to waterfall release, but you cannot go from waterfall dev to Agile release.
• Any code that you did not build unit test suites for will have bugs in it.
• It's never too late to write automated tests.
• Try to write a specific test to validate any but the most trivial bug fix if the bug makes it to the beta period.
• If you are trying to integrate code from another team late in the cycle there will be issues, most likely major issues.
• Don't trust your code, but trust someone else's code even less.
• If any teams use a waterfall development process, all teams will likely have to use a waterfall release process for final integration and build