Corporate Policies requires that developers cannot have so called 'elevated rights' on a server. Any server, including test and development servers.
Well, that is, the developers have been granted local admin privileges for the development servers, but as a special exception to the corporate policies.
The daylight savings patch that has to be installed, requires an upgrade of the application on the server, with an uninstall and a fresh install.
With a full redeploy of the content and reconfiguring connections to ldap, databases, other servers and reconfiguring user autorizations linked to the content.
The developer documents the deployment procedure in an installation guide.
Next the the upgrade has to be deployd to the test server, but none of the developers have local admin rights for the test server.
So, resources from platform operations have to be claimed by the coordinator. For the installation and the finalization of the application upgrade.
The upgrade takes a little more than the standard 2 hours that have been reserved per week, but finally after a week a slot is available to do the part that has to be done that requires local admin rights for the test server, by someone from platform operations.
At this point, the system test has slipped by a week, on a monthly release cycle, that is a significant amount of time.
A couple of day later the upgrade is deployed to the acceptance server for user testing. Except that most of the users refuse to test the changes, because there are no new features. In their eyes it is purely a technical upgrade.
Nevertheless a bug has been found, and it is declared blocking. It takes some days to resolved it.
By now, due to all the previous delay, the issue has not been resolved in time to get the change in production.
The monthly release date slips. The next slot available is the next month, and the application gets finally released into production.
Essentially, it means that if something does not get tested beforehand, like a deployment procedure, it eventually gets tested in production.
That is the best way to test something, isn't it? A consequence of the Corporate Policies.
Absurd?
Now I am going to watch some South Park episodes. I like documentaries.