Release Sprint (Part 4)
Or Finally done
As I wrote about in the previous two articles
There are a number of reasons why the team struggled so hard to finish the work in a timely manner. We reviewed these during our regular retrospective meeting prior to sprint planning this week. With teams that are as geographically diverse as mine are the options for how to hold a retrospective meeting are limited to a few options. I will write more about this in on the blog The Agile Samurai
On Wed. we held our Go No Go meeting with the stakeholders and after a review of the checklist the team was ready to Go with the release. On Thursday we made sure everyone was ready to Go. And at 10pm the installation started on the dozens of servers that needed the updated software. At midnight we had a check in call to make sure the installation was completed. Then the QA team and our BA started validating that the release was properly installed into production. I watched the QA testing which took two hours to complete.
When 2am came around the validation was completed and the release into production was declared a success! I then sent out a message to the stakeholdlers informing them of a successful release into production and went to sleep
We did have one problem during the validation in that the QA team did not have the checklist they should have had from the previous QA lead. She had dropped the ball on that knowledge transfer. Unfortunately she had also been in India for an extended vacation and then came back to a new job. So we didn't have a chance to get the right checklist. We will have it for the next release into production!