The last checklist before you ship
Nine questions we ask on the morning of a release, none of which are about the code.
Idris Vance
Contributing writer
Shipping goes wrong in the same handful of places every time, and almost none of them are the parts the team spent the sprint worrying about.
The questions
Does the empty state say something useful. Does the slowest connection in the office still get a readable page. Is every interactive element reachable with a keyboard. Does the error path lead somewhere. Is anything on the page a placeholder we forgot. Can someone unfamiliar finish the main task without a guide. Does it hold up at four hundred pixels wide. Have we told support what changed. And, quietly, is anyone still uneasy about it.
The last one matters most
That final question catches more problems than the other eight combined. Unease is usually a person half-remembering a case nobody wrote down. Ask it out loud, give it a minute of silence, and take whatever comes back seriously.
