Tag submarines before they shoot

In the retrospective meeting it was claimed we could probably have raised some hot issues earlier. The late addressing of these items put people under pressure shortly before rolling-out. Although it was correct that we had quite some late change requests which hurt not only devs but also testers, most of the issues were not late discoveries but rather late awareness of importance.

 The tickets were raised long time back but, because of release pressure, these were parked aside in the backlog and assigned low priority. We called it the “parking-place”. At that time, a restrictive process of prioritizing tickets was needed to manage the deadlines. The limitations were accepted for a while. But over time, things changed.  What was once rated low priority for release N, all of a sudden became more important in the next release and at a bad timing. For many stakeholders including me, these tickets came out of nowhere like submarines; and of course, all at same time.

As a lessons learnt, we - as testers - have decided to get better by regularly reviewing parked tickets. This is to help everyone in the team to become aware earlier of potential new dangerous "submarines" intending to surfac on the water plane soon. There would still be enough time then to tag these before they have a chance to shoot.

Patched UFOs

When developers state, they didn't change anything but one line of code, they actually believe that themselves. It's just that they have a bias towards forgetting all the work they've done (plus their colleagues') before their last coffee break.

Good old times

Almost every week, I get some updates notification on my smartphone. Fortunately I can decide on my own on when to download and/or to install it.
Where I work, customers have no such choice. When we upgrade our releases, every customer worldwide either gets some new features or suffers from the fact that we have to deliver another series of extra releases to fix what we've broken in the previous update. Anyhow, it is only a question of time until cars also get equipped with software that you may or may not need to upgrade/patch on a regular basis in order to keep them running while all those oldies will still work fine without.