Why release should be postponed

Now I am living in monthly release schedule. Every month we have regressions and all other processes for release. Not very often but sometimes happens that release needs to be postponed. Last time I had this situation was about six months ago. It was because of project I worked with. I am not proud of it, but happened what had has to happen.

Situation was very simple - developer underestimated development time and amount of bug registered for this feature. And everything ended even worse then just postponing release. Whole feature had to be removed from release, all affected areas had to be retested.
Having monthly releases and one of them postponing for two weeks affects whole company schedules, other releases, time to market, and I don't even know what more, but 100% sure it was affected.
Other interesting thing about that feature was that it was required by customers, I don't know details, but a lot of people were pissed because of this situation.

OK, enough of my experience.

Postponing release is not one man job (of course if company is not from one person) and it affects a lot of people even from outside the company(in my example). And then I start to think about all work - the line of issue criticality starts to blur out. How critical issue needs to be to stop whole process and push or stop everything for a period of time.
Image situation - Microsoft releasing new office packet, and for some reason there aren't "Save" button, just only two "Open" buttons and one of then works as save other as open. Do this bug is reason to postpone the release? Or other example - new FPS game has one level where just half of enemies are generated, this would be reason to postpone game release date? I wouldn't talk about military or medicine, there are different rules.
So both times I would suggest to release product and after release hot fix, but who I am to make such decisions. But these was small things, but if for example, product from office package crashes if document is with picture, or game has level without exit, these would be reasonable to postpone release. It could make huge impact on trust from users of these products. But line sometimes is so blurred out that it is hard to decide what to do.
In such situations clear head is needed, because of pressure from project manager or other management can make things even worse and bad decisions can be made. Always watch Your ass and what must need to be done - released on time, no matter what.

Yours friendly neighborhood Tester

Today I need to find a bug

Today is Wednesday, nothing very specific about this day, day like any other. But there will be one different - I will try to specify that I am doing to find bug. This week regressions are ongoing, I will step away from that for a little bit to find unrelated bug for the system.
While still on the way to work I need to think about place which is critical or highly important to whole system. "Product" is one of the main things for system. A lot of changes can be done to it, it is used for sales, reports, inventory management. Whole product depends on "product" to work properly (strange sentence, but self explaining). So I will focus on that.
One new setting was implemented for "product", to make it non-returnable if disabled. New stuff maybe more vulnerable so this maybe one of area's to focus. Now I am trying to use my knowledge and error guessing technique. This is my most used techniques then I am testing stuff.

I worked with this feature from front-end part, so I will try to find issue on part I wasn't involved in testing, back-end.

Founded issue faster then I expected. Bug was in "product" import. For easier management "product" has import, to deal with huge amount of them. For importing xls file is used, most of fields have possibility to use three states - with data, empty field and no column. With having all this knowledge I just need to check it. 

So if field is imported as empty(null value) - importer is unable to handle this case and incorrect error message is shown. Bug is registered, required info, file and log is added.

It was to damn easy. I fulfilled my task, but it wasn't challenging. Need to find other bug. Same target - "product". I should use other approach, not error guessing. 

Well everything went not as expected. Now is week later from previous paragraph - where I wanted to find another bug. That day I started with my ordinary tasks and founded myself week later without bug I wanted to find. So nothing to share about that and I want to touch other topic. So closing this post with defect, which will be founded later.

Your friendly neighborhood Tester

View of the bug - Support

First person who receives all the hate from customer about system issues is customer support employee. First line of defense who handles all the issues and complaints about software and all systems overall. I don't even need to guess, I know how they hate bugs from customers.
Not so long ago our company started hire support in my country and office. Quite fast office became full of people. Just couple of month passed and I started to see faces of disappointment and eyes full of sadness. Yeap, I am trying to sound more dramatic, but this is really close to reality. Hours of taking with crazy customers, dealing with they lack of knowledge and ignorance. And they also had to handle bugs. All this work makes this job tough.
Not so long ago I was witnessed of horrible accident. I am not sure about roots of issue, but I will try to explain as it was explained to me. Front-end application had its end of expiration date. And just couple of company heads knew about it. And one evening app stopped working for hundreds of clients. What I heard about situation, that there was about 45 customers for every support employee waiting in line to be connected. Hundreds of angry customers were that day (or night, depending on region, for me was night). And workaround was not that easy – time had to be turn back for 24 hours, clients database saved, app deleted, new app installed and database uploaded to new app. And it took some time ti figure this out, and to do this procedure for every calling customer.

Then I came to the work next morning – I felt like I was responsible for this issue, eyes full of anger and faces totally exhausted looking at me, and asking crazy question in which I didn't had answers. Later, after several chats I started to understand horrors of that night.

So back to view – it is easy to guess that they do not like bugs. They had to deal with same bug over and over again. All design issues and things that was not thought through making they work even harder and time consuming. But they had to deal with that, it is they work and if everything would work perfectly, they would not be needed. Sometimes I feel responsible for some issues I left not tested, but it is not about me. (Part 2 of N/A)

Your friendly neighborhood Tester.