One day the PL asked me to provide a checklist with the most important acceptance criteria and which served as checkpoints to enter the next phase of the project. The list was later extended with a few more items by the PL and PO. When the date came closer, someone worked on the list and changed most of the quality attributes from MUST to NICE-TO-HAVE without upfront warning. Obviously, someone realized one is not going to meet all the goals and changed the attributes beforehand. As a quality manager, I was concerned that tasks labelled NICE-TO-HAVE are never picked up, therefore I protested heavily.
We then agreed to keep the list with its original priority, and, on D-DAY we would go through the list again and then decide for each unfinished task how bad it really is and what are the risks related if we are not completing the task.
But, the cartoon fits even better to several similar situations where the testers warned management long in advance about the immaturity of the system. When deadlines were close, the pattern was often the same: concerns were overruled, management had “higher” goals and caused a mess with the decision to rollout the software despite the obvious consequences.
