A few years ago, at an agency I worked at, we launched a corporate WordPress site by migrating the whole database from our development environment to production. The demo had looked perfect. The client had signed off.
The reports started coming in almost immediately — first from our own post-launch review, then from the client's side as they clicked through their brand-new site. Buttons that led nowhere. Images that wouldn't load. Our local dev URLs were hardcoded all over the site: pasted into button links, baked into image paths. Nothing had looked wrong, because on our machines, those URLs worked fine.
Three of us spent the rest of that day clicking through every single page, hunting for leftovers. We fixed what we found and quietly hoped we'd found them all. No one yelled at us. The consequence was quieter than that, and heavier: the string of post-launch defects was treated as a formal incident, with a permanent entry in the company's internal incident list. That entry doesn't expire. As far as I know, it's still there.
The handoff problem
Handoff is the moment responsibility changes hands — the most dangerous, and the most important, moment in the entire project.
