Sometimes this industry makes me want to scream. My old favourite the artificially tight deadline has been back in force this week with a project due to finish at the end of the month being shortened to the 23rd and now further short end to this Friday.
Obviously, in order to deliver the project will have to skip most if not all of the testing. Problems will occur in a very user facing environment and there will be no pre-learnt knowledge of failure modes which in turn means a very steep learning curve.

of course, chances are everything will be fine. Chances are testing won't uncover any major problems, chances are the testing can be deleted with no obvious impact to the systems.

however, without testing its impossible to know, without testing the little oddities that do crop up during the operation of a system cant be found or at least recognised.

a second really annoying part is that the project management tool we are using requires testing to be added so all the tests have been carefully thought about and added and now they won't be used.

this is my bosses boss demanding this so do I get on with it knowing the system will be inferior or refuse unless its properly tested?

At the end of the day I consider myself part of the engineering community with standards and a pride in my work so I will make a noise but fights like these end up leaving me drained, tired and wondering why the hell I still work in this sector.

This project doesn't need to deliver early. It just makes the stats look good and I am now fed up of working long days to fix something that should not have been delivered broken in the first place.