I entirely agree with Bill and Roy here.
The release manager owns the release short of using the big stick of a full fledged vote. It's a miserable job; bow down in sympathy. I have never worked on any project where that wasn't the case. But every project I've worked on people would grab one or more terms of exagerated speech 'showstopper', 'data corrupting', 'crashing', 'top priority', 'critical customer need', whatever and use it to draw attention to the issues they felt deserved our attention first and foremost. Nothing wrong with that. It's a device for managing the queue of work. It's fun to use strong words. As Roy said it's a tool. It is not our device for gating the release. This is always a problem though because at somepoint somebody points out that it seems bizzare to be shipping the product inspite of 'death star need' items in the work Q. I think we should just change the term 'show stopper' in the status file to: 'Extremely Important Stuff, Damn it!' The tangled problem of how to improve the status file... well as usual that like so many problems is waiting for a burst of brilliance and a volunteer. - ben
