Things you don’t want to have happen the week you intend to deploy:
- You finally get access to the production data. Extra points for this being on the production system itself because, for some reason, the production data couldn’t be copied onto the development system.
- Double extra points for not getting connected to the production system until the day before scheduled deployment.
- You finally get more than one test user.
- You’re asked to make a major change to the way you sync the primary data set. After an extensive effort to make this happen quickly, you are asked to discard that work and try a different approach.
- While discussing the details of a final round of acceptance testing following all the above, you’re informed of yet another change, this time to the primary transaction data.
Supposedly all these details had been settled on months ago and fully documented. But when you are dealing with a third party vendor who is also dealing with another third party vendor, things can go cock-eyed pretty quickly. When you sense this sort of situation developing (or step into one up to your elbows), stay calm and document everything. It’s especially important after phone conferences to write up and distribute a recap of the discussion. And then be very careful not to get sucked into a blame game. For now, fix the problem. Once the problem is fixed, review all the documentation to see if there’s a way to avoid having to deal with the same problem in the future.
Sam Herdman 