PhiEaglesFan:
You also make a go no-go decision the day before release. I'd say they found that they borked the camera pretty quickly (and the sounds issue too), but the the time to take to fix it probably would have postponed the release itself.
So, the next question you always ask is this: Can people still accomplish the main functions of the game/website despite the presence of these errors?
Yeah, the cameras are goofy and the sounds are messed up, but this doesn't detract from the core ability to still play the game. So, you release anyway with non-critical errors, and target a fix for those in the next release.
Schedule vs Quality is always a tough call and it is clear to me Schedule has more weight than Quality in the Release criteria of WGT. There are too many "non-critical" errors in the latest release. Many of those errors are so obvious they should have been identified much earlier in development.
How many are related to the New Camera Views For Putting feature? Look at my list of problems introduced in this release. 5 of the 7 are related to views! IMO that feature is a POS (and that is not Point Of Sale!). Its not only that it appears to have broken many functions that worked for years, its implementation has not been well received by us customers.!
I'm not an expert in the Agile life-cycle used at WGT, (having 30+ years experience working in all phases and managing all phases of a Waterfall process.), but i do know it is goal oriented. Initially the Product Owner sets goals for the release. Those goals normally list the features and priority of each feature targeted for the release and hopefully some Quality criteria for the release. Personally I like something along the lines of "new changes will not affect existing functionality" because customers don't like it.
Essentially the Product Owner defines the value of the release. So look at what was in the June 25th release. I'd vote that both the CC improvements and New Camera Views features would be low priority as there's no commitment to the customers (us) to have those features in July. My opinion.
No problem then moving the New Camera Views to the next release. That addition does not meet any "Done-ness" criterial I could imagine. Pull it and you've got another month to clean it up. And those non-critical problems never show up in the Release criterial.
The bottom line is its not all about Schedule & Quality, Content has to be part of the decision making process. And their methodology supports it.