It’s 3 am in California, and you are still awake trying to sort through a release process that has been delayed by several hours. The deployment to the main application cluster took several extra hours due to an unanticipated problem with the servers, and now everyone is waiting on the lead database administrator to call into a conference bridge so you can all move on to Step 53.5b of the deployment. Your production deployments always seem to be problematic and this one might be the worst you’ve experienced yet.
Everyone’s Tired: Bad Decisions AboundBy «everyone,» I mean the 30 QA testers and 3 project managers in California, several developers in Sydney and India, and an operations team spread throughout the EU and the US. You can tell by some of the ambient noise on this conference call that people are starting to falter.