What's with the overwhelming number of comments from right-wing crazies?

Forgot to mention, morale is in the toilet, because after 2 years of effort we're about to release a new, fully standard-compliant version of the application with -0- new features, and even less compatibility with external applications than before.

Most people here have told me the only reason they have not left is because we'd never be able to get the same money or even half the vacation elsewhere.

My group is a prime example. We all worked for a startup that generally released a new version of our application about 3 times per year. Over a few years we had developed a nice lean development process that involved documenting our design, but only in enough detail to be able to fairly accurately estimate the development effort (in X days, X weeks, or X months).

Based on the estimates, the biz dev group would then pick and choose features to make up 3 months dev + test time.

This worked great, and we pretty much never had a late shipment and few bugs.

Then we got acquired by a giant 3-letter company with huge amounts of development process and tons and tons of "standards", and immediately were ordered to begin a 16 month release consisting of removing all open source and complying with standards. All their architects routinely veto our decisions and our design documents must be very very detailed and approved via heavyweight process before implementation can begin. 24 months later we're still in development, only recently the last design document was finally approved; at the moment it seems we'll be about 12 months late in total.

Now they're asking us why we have so many tests planned, and making us remove half of them. Supposedly quality is a major priority, but they have no testing group; only people to enforce standards. All tests and test cases are written and implemented by the developers themselves.

Dont even get me started about the outsourcing issues.