Apoorva writes:  Handling bugs when you are relatively close to
ship date? Would like to hear some "real time" stories about
some difficult decisions you had to make while shipping a
product and what made you take those decisions. Say, convincing
dev to get a bug fixed or dev convincing you it's not worth
fixing right now.... anything which is on similiar lines. The
kind of trade-off's you had to make and why you made them?
Since my product hasn't announced yet I can't go much beyond
generalities. The most interesting story that comes to mind
actually happened to a friend of mine. This person is the best
tester I have ever had the pleasure of working with. He is so
good, in fact, that his developers have been known to band
together to buy him lunch and thus stop him from entering bugs
for a while! Picture a tester this good assigned to testing the
rewrite of the entire import/export of a foreign file format.
The previous version of this functionality worked OK, but it was
problematic enough that combined wit