Blitzkrieg testing

(Wikipedia) Blitzkrieg (German, "lightning war") is an anglicized term describing a method of warfare whereby an attacking force spearheaded by a dense concentration of armored and motorized or mechanized infantry formations, and heavily backed up by close air support, forces a breakthrough into the enemy's line of defense through a series of short, fast, powerful attacks

Although we're striving to automate as much development processes as we can, in some cases of complex product releases we still need to ensure products pass human / manual testing so there are no broken functionality issues we missed

What happens when we have limited number of testers covering multiple products from multiple development teams? As we never test in parallel, one or more products inevitably gets delayed, we pile up technical waste and lose agility

Consider a typical development scenario:
  1) On day 1 Dev team A works for 3 weeks and builds Product A for testing
  2) On day 2 Dev team B works for 3 weeks and builds Product B for testing
  3) The same software testers cover both Dev team A and Dev team B
  4) Software testers receive Product A and Product B for testing on week 4
  5) We prioritize products based on their ROI, date of last release, customer requests - one product still gets delayed and there is always at least one customer that we've let down

Instead of losing momentum, we can now add air support (developers) to help mechanized infantry (software testers) and blitzkrieg the product for one day

Years ago in early days of ApexSQL each developer was owning exactly one product and was also responsible to self-test the product before sending it to testers. Without this mandatory self-testing we've regressed to not doing any self-testing prior to sending products to testing

Consider different step #5 above:
  5) Dev team A works together with software testers to blitzkrieg-test Product A for one day and release it as Interim build or even production build if software testers agree
  6) Dev team B works together with software testers the next day to blitzkrieg-test Product B for one day and release it as Interim/production build

Critical note: developers cannot report bugs "internally" or fix them on-the-fly: all bugs must be reported to software testers who will then create bugs in the system and prioritize them accordingly

Also to avoid confusion - some online blogs say that Blitzkrieg testing = spot-testing; there is a major difference: spot-testing is quick testing by a lone scout, while Blitzkrieg is a short but major quality offensive