Test the right stuff

As always, the few precious hour before release were hectic last week. Actually, yesterday it was a week ago. Terrible: the developers were fixing critical bugs the last minutes. And then we made a stupid mistake. Not testing the most crucial stuff: does it work to install the goodies?
Yesterday, our Operations team tried installing. It didn´t work. The last minute fixes worked on our development environment, but when setting up a test installation, it simply didn't work. And if you can't install it, you can't use it. Then you can discuss test driven development and code coverage to it's end. But you still might not have tested the most crucial stuff.
In cycling, the mountains are divided into categories, 5, 4, 3, 2 and 1, where 1 is the most difficult category. Then there is HC, that's beyond categorization. The mountains cars have trouble conquering. The mountains it would take us days to climb on a bike. If we'd make it at all.
In our team, we've introduced a HC category on our priority list. Beyond priority. If we don't complete those tasks, nothing else matters. And testing an installation is definitely a HC task.