Go-live readiness meeting. Two weeks to go. Forty-one open defects, six of them classed as high.
What follows is not a transcript of any particular meeting. It is a transcript of most of them.
Watch who stands up first, and watch who stands up second.
Business Manager: Before we go through the list, I want to be clear about the standard. The target should be software without defects. My users cannot be the ones who find these.
Vendor Delivery Manager: We agreed exit criteria in March. Zero high, up to twelve medium with documented workarounds, low deferred to the first patch.
Business Manager: I am not comfortable accepting something we already know is broken.
Program Director: I do not think anyone in this room is going to argue against quality.
Quality Lead: Quality has to come first.
Vendor Delivery Manager: We are fully committed to delivering quality.
Test Manager: There is no build without known defects. Not this one, not the one it replaces.
Program Director: Let us not get lost in the detail. Can we look at the six?
Test Manager: Three are configuration and can be closed this week. One needs a design decision from architecture. Two are in the vendor’s core product.
Vendor Delivery Manager: Those two are working as designed.
Test Manager: They are on the defect list.
Vendor Delivery Manager: They are on the defect list as raised. They are working as designed.
Business Manager: And while we are here. Why should we pay to test your software?
Vendor Delivery Manager: Testing is in the statement of work as a joint activity.
Business Manager: It still feels like we are paying twice.
Business Manager: So, can we get to zero?
Test Manager: Not on this date.
Program Director: Then let us go away and see what is achievable.
Eleven weeks later
Same room. Same agenda item.
Test Manager: Sixty-three open. Nine high.
Business Manager: It was forty-one.
Test Manager: We closed fifty-two. Regression opened thirty-eight. Four of the nine high are in code the vendor touched to fix the original six.
Vendor Delivery Manager: We would point out that thirty of the sixty-three are enhancements raised as defects.
Business Manager: They are things that do not work.
Vendor Delivery Manager: They are things that were not specified.
Business Manager: Some of these my team could live with. There is a workaround for the invoicing one. We used it for years on the old system.
Program Director: We set a standard in March.
Business Manager: I set that standard in March. I did not know then what I know now.
Program Director: The team has worked to it for eight months. I am not going to tell them today that it no longer applies.
Vendor Delivery Manager: The fourth revision puts us in November. That assumes no further regression.
Test Manager: There will be further regression.
Business Manager: Support on the old system ends in December.
Quality Lead: I think the standard has served us well. It has kept quality front of mind all year.
Programme Director: Agreed.
The Business Manager did not know. That is allowed. Nobody outside software development has any reason to know that fixing fifty-two defects can produce thirty-eight more, and “the target should be software without defects” sounds, to someone accountable for the users, like simple diligence.
The Programme Director knew. Third go-live, at least. Has seen a defect list on every single one of them. And what he said, in March, when it was still free to say anything, was that nobody in the room was going to argue against quality.
That is the entire mistake. Not the demand, but the endorsement, from the one person in the room qualified to say the word impossible, at the only moment when saying it would have cost nothing more than an uncomfortable minute.
In the film, every man who stands up knows exactly what it is going to cost him.
That is the difference. In the meeting it costs him nothing at all.
It costs the project a year.