Anyone who has watched Apollo 13 or perhaps seen an actual launch of a spacecraft (like me!) has seen the "GO/NO GO" sequence where all areas have to give a "GO" for the spacecraft to launch. Rolling out new software is similar.
A few weeks ago we had a really tough call to make. We had delayed the release of a significant upgrade to Informz for a week to take care of some technical issues. The following week, we unfortunately had to do the same thing, but getting the team who all had "roll-out fever" to the right decision was tough.
Development was being their typical optimistic selves while QA really wanted to go live because this release was holding up a great deal of other work but realized there was risk involved. There were so many question marks in the release.
It was our lead DBA who was part of the GO/NO GO who simply said "This is not the way to do business." that lead the team back to reality kept the build in QA for an extra week of testing.
It was definitely the right thing to do. QA found many issues during the next week and Development was able take care of them prior to the next weekend roll-out.
The roll-out still created a few issues that were quickly sorted out, but all in all became one of our best roll-outs.
My big take away from this is the importance of ensuring that everyone on the team feels they can speak up at any time to ensure we keep a quality product and that we keep the professionalism of a NASA control room.
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