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At most of the big companies I worked at (over 500 employees) there is a steering committee doing prioritization work and continuous integration test suites and an elaborate change control committee and process such that fixing a spelling error will take much more than two days.

Whats nice about the proceduralism is you can document that the steering committee only meets once a week on Tuesday afternoons and change control meets on Thursday. And everyone knows the automated test suite on DEV takes about half a working day. So if a change can't be worked into the schedule in less than a day, it'll never pass CI testing before the change control meeting so it'll take more than a week.

Whats bad, is mgmt would like you to complete multiple changes perhaps at the same time which always complicates the change control process especially if change #7 failed last week so company policy is to roll everything back and now we have 13 changes, two weeks worth, to complete next weekend. Also whats bad, is knowing its a corporate nightmare to make any change, why did I make a mistake to begin with of having the buttons swapped or a misssspelling or whatever.

I find the big metric now a days is backlog. Lets see the number of request tickets decrease this week instead of increase. That leads to intense pressure to roll multiple problems into one ticket.



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