Doubting Thomas: QA Won't Close the Resurrection Ticket

HeavenOps Incident Report #1127 - Post-Resurrection Deployment QA Blockage

In the post-release chaos of the Resurrection deployment, the HeavenOps QA team was ready to sign off—except for one engineer: Thomas.

The Incident

Ticket #777: RESURRECTION-PROD-DEPLOY

• Status: BLOCKED - QA VERIFICATION PENDING
• Assignee: Thomas (QA Lead)
• Sprint: Passion Week v3.3

The resurrection feature passed all automated tests, integration checks, and even a code review by Peter. However, Thomas refused to close the ticket, citing insufficient tactile verification:

Thomas: “Unless I put my finger on the merge conflict and my hand into the side of the running process, I will not approve this release. The test coverage is incomplete.”

The Daily Standup

Scrum Master: “Any blockers?”

• Product: “The feature is live in production and users are reporting miraculous results.”
• QA (Thomas): “Show me the logs. No, show me the running process. No, let me exec into the container and poke it myself.”
• DevOps: “We have 100% uptime, all health checks are green, and monitoring shows zero errors.”
• QA (Thomas): “Not good enough. I want to see the nail holes in the deployment and the wounds in the container runtime.”

Resolution Protocol

1. Jesus appears in the staging environment and invites Thomas to run a hands-on integration test.
2. Thomas executes manual verification:

   kubectl exec -it resurrection-pod -- /bin/bash
   curl -X POST /api/v1/wounds/verify --data '{"finger": true, "hand": true}'
   

3. Response: {"status": "verified", "wounds": "visible", "doubts": "resolved"}
4. Thomas finally updates the ticket: Status: APPROVED - TACTILE VERIFICATION COMPLETE

Lessons Learned

• Trust but verify: Some QA engineers require more than green builds—they need physical proof and hands-on validation.
• Budget for edge cases: Always allocate extra story points for tactile verification in your post-miracle sprints.
• Documentation matters: Even miraculous deployments need proper test evidence and audit trails.
• Staging environment access: Ensure your QA team can directly interact with running processes when standard monitoring isn’t enough.

Team Retrospective Notes

Thomas: “My bad for blocking the release, but you have to understand—resurrection is a pretty big feature. We can’t just YOLO it to prod.”

Jesus: “No worries, Thomas. Thorough QA prevents production incidents. Just maybe trust the process a little more next time?”

“Blessed are those who merge without seeing, but some QA will always want to poke the process.”