Also, good point when talking root cause analysis; maybe what you think is the root is really not the root. Maybe you think everyone else is the problem when it’s really you.

Maybe I should fix myself even though it’s easier to blame others.

But I disagree with one point. ” As a top level person in management, it’s more important that I get the product out than it being good quality. “. Did that myself earlier in my career. Typical whining of us under-appreciated programmers. Then I came to realize: If you can sell it, it ain’t bad. It ain’t broken.

Or better: Every software is broken. The better ones still work often enough.

I was going to recommend making a list to check whether your roots of problems
a) were actually the roots
b) were actually relevant to the product’s success (you know a bug and it has not been reported for 6 months?).
But then I saw the root of the problem: Lack of trust in the management’s ability to manage. Go fix that.

I just came across your blog and wanted to drop you a note telling you how impressed I was with the information you have posted here.

Please let me introduce you some info related to this post and I hope that it is useful for software testing community.

There is a good Software Testing resource site, Have alook

http://SoftwareTestingNet.com

simi

Also, speaking of hotfixes and stupid mistakes. I just made a hotfix on my blog entry for a stupid mistake I made. I meant “plain stupid”, not “plane stupid”. Doh!

Loved this bit, as in my curent project I now get SVN emails about once an hour documenting the latest hotfix on a business critical system that wobbles.

“You should not be making hot fixes on production! That’s a sign of bigger problems. And if you do have to make a fix on production it needs to go through a review and approval process. And it should be the exception, not the rule. It should never be some lone coder firing new code into production without consulting anyone. That’s just plane stupid.”