Conflicts of production vs. development team

When it comes to introduce some new feature in a smoothly running line of production, a panic attack occurs to production team and they are very reluctant to such change. Reason is, management is not discarding the existing production or replacing the old product with new products where we can completely forget about the old product. Instead what management wants is to keep producing the old products and introduce the new products (or new config of the existing product) on the smooth running line. If management says that we no longer produce that old product but will only do this new product, then production team will be happey enough to upgrade or change the current line.

This often happens, when there is a platform change. For eg. Windows 7 is no longer supported but still quite a lot of machines runs on Windows 7 and Windows 11 are being introduced to machines.

Very often the case, new product needs upgrades to the existing line (or existing software in the line) and everyone on production team starts seeing the risk that these upgrades might break the current product.

Ways to mitigate the risk:

Way 1

- Backup the line

- Upgrade the line and check if it still produces the old products (run atlest 10 or 100 or 1000 or whichever your threshold to get the confidence)

- No breakage in existing line now

Way 2

- If the upgrade breaks the existing product and old smooth production are suffering from the change

- Then use the backup and try dual booting as one other option.

It's is so simply said here, there are lot of nittygritty happens, all small version change, continuous improvements to the new product starts from here and these continuous improvement (or we ccan say continuous upgrade) can break the old product at later stage. However this can give a big picture idea of how we can approach this conflict.

The recent introduciton of the remote pushing of software could start a problem even the backups are automatically upgrades, like NI-Systemlink. All in all, some of the team should have control over what goes to the production line.