. You are the project manager for a company that is building a behavioral health

Question

. You are the project manager for a company that is building a behavioral health system for some of the counties in your state. The project is slightly ahead of schedule and there haven’t been any significant problems to date. In reviewing some of the screens under construction, you are surprised to find a number of features that were not part of the design. The system builder was one of your most talented and creative programmers. When you ask about these features, the builder proudly tells you that they add to the functionality of the system without taking any additional programming time, and that they were intended to be a surprise. You can see that the features definitely do add to the functionality of the system. The code has already been written for them – should you allow them to be included in the system, even though they were not part of the approved technical design? Explain your answer.

Explanation / Answer

Though the new added features and its code is added to the system as a surprise and it does add the functionality of the system but it is not wise to allow them to be included for release.

Since the extra features were not part of the approved technical design , there are chances that these features might have some flaws functionally or not being so useful from few of the stakeholder's perspective to make the product a success. There is a huge probability for having regressions for the basic functionality as well if the integration testing and test case plan is not executed properly and there are chances that due to overload on the testing team, some of the test scenarios which are impacted or caused due to new feature might get overlooked or missed in test execution.

Best could be to completely exclude these new features for current schedule of release and first get them reviewed and approved with the functional team and then only get them added in next release of the project.

Or in the worst case if it is impossible or unproductive to remove its traces completely in code, that all code can be masked using some common flag value which decides whether to enable new features or not. In present release of the project, all new unapproved features shall be disabled and only that code which was approved shall be delivered.

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