The audacity of hope

There was an article online stating why hope driven development is bad, Forget about Hope Driven Development (HDD), the cancer of software development. It is true that code quality and frequent demos are key to good software. That is the heart of agile development.

However sometimes we live in a less than perfect world. We may be put on projects where you are maintaining a code base written by 10 different people who have left the team.  You are now pressured by client demands to release a fix to the code base, whether that be a new column in the grid or some change to an interface. You make the change and now what? You release to a test environment and it works. You release to for QA and user sign off, great. Now you release it to production. Will your small change miss some corner case that is only possible in production that everyone couldn't test because you couldn't load that certain data into the database because another team was using it to test. You don't know. Are you gonna stop the release for this one small non show stopper bug? Here enters hope.