Oh FFS! Someone's going to get canned for this.

[2BIT]

tested in UAT(by me)

there's your problem right there...

[MarillionFan]

I agree, if you test post production the devs probably never got a spec.

Anything post production is not the dev's fault.

They've now looked into in more detail and the offshore consultancy have come to the conclusion it was the UK contractor who finished up on Friday and had production access. They reckon he must have accidently switched it off when he was deploying a change into production a few months ago and didn't follow process. (basically they didn't manage him as the dev manager bought him in to get us back on target)

Scapegoat contractor found. Dead mans shoes. Bob has saved the day and all is good with the world.

[2BIT]

Testers, Testers, Testers.

Testers are 100% to blame if a system goes live with defects, or goes live and then fails, they should be testing it after it goes live.

whilst I agree the reality in my experience is that the Testers are rarely competent, there are Testers and then those low level bods who are brought in to make up the numbers, I've never worked with a real tester and as a result the testing becomes one big box checking excersize.. not saying these low level bods are all bad but most wont want to be testers for long

for example recently had two tranches of code being tested, mine was being tested by a sharp young guy who loathed the fact he had to do testing instead of analysis and the offshore piece was tested by a 'box checker'

the defects in my code were raised in a timely fashion and fixed well in advance of go live, the off-shore code was approved and signed-off but come go-live it became clear that the code was absolutely riddled with errors

the offshore guy had not unit tested at all (despite saying he had) and the tester didn't really test at all - caused us so many issues its not even funny....

so Testers are essential but treating testing as just a box checking exercise is actually more damaging than not testing at all...