Release testing keeps running past 9, someone has to sign off, and it's usually me

cobalt_puzzle_903412 Aug 2026

Still at my desk. Third release night this month. My partner covers the evenings when I'm late, but only when there's no site visit, and the younger one has started asking every morning if I'll be home for dinner. I manage the QA team, so in theory I can leave. In practice the last regression run finishes around 8.30 and someone has to sign off. Has anyone in a similar role managed to hand over sign-off, or move release timings, without it turning into a fight with the dev leads?

3 comments

dusk_paper_442912 Aug 2026
We had a version of this when my team owned model releases. What changed it was moving the release cut-off, not my leaving time. Releases went out at 4 pm, and if regression wasn't green by 2 it moved to the next morning. The dev leads hated it for two sprints and then planned around it. Is the 8.30 finish because testing starts late, or because builds arrive late? Those need different fixes.
- sunny_drum_966112 Aug 2026
  Builds arriving late is ours exactly. Did you need your director to back the 2 pm rule, or did the team just start doing it?
teal_camera_949712 Aug 2026
From the dev side, sorry 🙂 We were the late-build people. What fixed it for us was a rotation: two QA engineers trained to sign off, each owning release nights in turn, nobody doing more than one late night a week. It took a month before everyone trusted the second sign-off. My aai still had to come over a few nights while it settled.
apricot_pebble_84213 Aug 2026
Different field, same shape of problem. Theatre lists overrun and someone has to close. In our unit, the person with a fixed commitment hands over at a set time, and that is written on the list in the morning, not negotiated at 7 pm. Once it was written down in advance, nobody argued. I would separate two questions: whether sign-off needs to be you, and whether the late finish is occasional or chronic. If it is chronic, that is a staffing conversation for someone above the dev leads.