All ecommerce projects have a major milestone – going from launch to production – where the outside world gets to see the fruits of the team’s labours. Prior to this the site requires plenty of testing.
Many testing methodologies can be employed, from test analysts using spreadsheets to track ad-hoc testing of the site (not recommended) through to a thorough process encompassing automated testing and a dedicated test team.
During testing, defects are raised and classified in the usual way:
Blocking bug – can’t launch with one of these
Major bug – don’t want to launch with more than X of these
Minor bug – don’t want to launch with more than Y of these
No matter how well the project has gone, there will come a point when the pressure is on to launch and suddenly those Majors seem like Blockers or “actually, this Minor is more important than this Blocker, can you work on that?”
At Sceneric we call this “launch anxiety” and it can halt a project on the brink of success because fear of failure becomes the overriding emotion of the project.
How to recognise it?
Track the bugs in a decent bug / task tracking package (Sceneric uses Jira & Greenhopper)
Constant communication between the delivery team and the site owner – reaffirm the expected business case of the system
If, close to launch deadline, there is a sudden upward trend of Blocking bugs – sit down and discuss as a team. Are these *really* Blocking bugs, or is it a way of delaying launch (which might be useful from a dependency perspective), a genuine fear of launching or simply a way to get “best value for money” in the development phase?
If launch anxiety is taking hold, it’s important to clients and vendors alike to remember the cost of not launching – the opportunity cost. We often see 100% increases in online revenue with new sites which could mean tens of thousands of pounds a day of lost revenue for every day the launch is delayed.
It begs the question “is this bug really stopping me from launching my site and missing out on that extra cash?”
www.sceneric.com
