A trend I am seeing in solution delivery these days is piloting. With piloting, New functionality can be slowly ramped up in production, or more importantly, ramped down when problems occur.
This detaches performance testing from specific release dates. Essentially the application is regression tested with all new functionality disabled, reducing the amount of testing required to go live. New functionality can be switched on after adequate testing.
As testing has always been the accordion in the SDLC band, making a lot of noise as it’s time line is squashed, this is probably a good thing.
Personally, I am a fan of this style of development. I have seen too many organizations push ahead with releases regardless of testing coverage. This approach allows project managers, vendors and stakeholders to achieve their launch dates without the front page horrors.
