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The project manager asked for evidence that the defect existed. I showed him a screen recording. He asked for evidence that a user would follow those steps. The user who reported it was on the call. She confirmed that she had followed those steps. He asked whether we had evidence from a second user.
A developer disputed a typo defect. The project arranged a workshop with twelve people. We discussed severity, customer impact and whether the missing letter changed the meaning. The developer fixed it during the meeting. The meeting continued for another forty minutes.
The defect only affected existing customers. The project manager called that a small minority. I asked how many customers were existing customers. “All of them.” The issue affected a small minority of everybody.
Development needed an answer from the product owner. The product owner was on leave. The developer moved the ticket into the QA column because he could not progress it. At stand-up, the board showed six tickets blocked in QA. Testing was asked to improve its throughput.
A production defect appeared in the release notes as a known issue. Testing had never seen it. I asked when it became known. The project manager said immediately after go-live. It was known with exceptional speed.
The developer asked me to retest the defect. I asked what had changed. He said nothing. I retested it. It passed. He said, “You never know.” Hope had entered the deployment pipeline.
The test status was amber because two critical defects remained open. The programme director asked for it to be green before the steering committee. The defects stayed open. The system stayed broken. PowerPoint made a complete recovery.
The developer rejected the defect as user error. The user who found it was in the meeting. She explained exactly what she had done. The developer said real users would not behave like that. She reminded him that she was a real user. He changed the reason to “unsupported user behaviour.”
The product owner formally accepted the release risk. The dashboard remained amber. He asked why accepting it had not made the status green. I explained that accepting a risk did not remove it. He asked whether he could accept it more strongly.
The project manager asked how long testing would take. I said I needed the scope, build and acceptance criteria first. He asked for a rough estimate. I said two weeks. He replied, “We have two days. What can you do in two days?” “Two days of testing.”