ravencallscrows | (no subject)

Ready for another little rant?
Good. I had faith in you. I knew you weren't like all those other people.
Ever feel like you're not working toward something? Like the more work you put into a project, the farther from completion it is? Don'tcha love it when it's not because you changed the scope of what you were doing (which is one thing, because it's completely self-contained)?
Don'tcha wish I'd stop asking rhetorical questions and get to the point?

Well, here it is. The release date for my current project at work has gotten pushed back again. It's no longer this fall, nor next April. It's not even next fall now. It's been pushed all the way back to September 2004 tentatively now- two and a half years off. It's going to take serious dedication from anyone to commit to being here from beginning to end- as my new boss says he's expecting from all his people.

Pushing release back makes sense for the eventual consumers and users of the software- it'll allow a significant amount of time for things to be integrated properly, but from a test vantage, it's sheerly insane. First, development work seems to expand to fill the time available for it, which means that testing still comes down to working under the gun for the last six months before it releases. Secondly, there's the matter of continuity. Lots of things are going to happen in people's lives in thirty months. Even natural attrition can have a serious effect in that time.
Someone really needs to rethink this decision before things get out of hand. Personally, I'm hoping not to be here in six months (weeks, if at all possible!), and can't even imagine the September 2004 date. If they're going to commit to that, they need to reassign people who want to actually test software to other projects and recall them nine months to a year out, or they're going to vanish.