Protip: Get Downtime Estimates From QA

When an engineer gives you their best guess as to when technical updates will be completed, they aren’t thinking like a customer. They’re thinking like an engineer, and they are almost certainly telling you what time the actual technical work will be finished.

They are not counting the time it will take to test the changes, to bring the servers back online, to test the changes on the live environment, to fix the thing that doesn’t work, to repeat the test cycle, and to reconnect the launcher/patcher.

Instead, ask QA for the best estimate to give to customers. The QA people are the ones who know how long the total cycle will take – and they also know how likely the patch/upgrade is to work out of the box, because they’re the only ones who know how well tested (or not) the material really is.

And then add two hours.