Is that the product release criteria?

This is the story of a tester who worked on a project which was related to the backup management. He was the third tester to whom the project was assigned. There was no documentation available related to that project.

From last two month he has not recommended any build to the management for the release purpose to the client. The reason behind that he noticed a lot of fatal issues which exists in the project and the development team was not able to fix those issues. Old issues were reopened when the development team tried to fix the new issues, reason given to the tester was the complexity of the code. Hence the release date of project was over.

As tester knows that product will be used by the n- number of users on the internet therefore he performed the performance testing. But Management tied testers hand by asking “who has asked you to perform the performance testing, focus only on the functionalities of the project “. As a result, some important issues were marked closed by the management. Now tester was more focused on the functionality of the project. Again he tried to highlight the old issues which exist in the project and were related to the functionality. Management told the tester that these are as designed or it is the feature of the project (while in the initial phase of the project they called them as good bugs). Result is some issues are marked closed.

One day management asked the tester about the Bug report, Tester again mentioned all the existed issues in the report. Now the tester was called for the discussion, he explained all the issues and the importance of fixing those issues on which management agreed to fix some issues and a few can be informed to the client with the release note. Also before the release, development team will provide a new build after fixing those issues on which management was agreed.

But next day tester come to know that project was released to the client without fixing the issues. As a result tester feels cheated, frustrated and demotivated. And he was asking from himself “Is this the release criterion of a project?”