I like this question and I hope more startups/companies explain how they maintain quality. There are far more stories about how "I code this in 24/48 hours/1week/3week" but less stories about "this is how we maintain high-quality code" or "this is our automation strategy".

I am not sure this is the right question to ask.

The problem is that you can build an elaborate maze of QA checks and still miss problems like these (and kill the company's ability to innovate in the process).

The reasons why you have (or don't have) various QA processes are much more interesting than the processes themselves.

Indeed. The underlying assumption that a "QA process" as traditionally conceived would have prevented this sort of problem is fairly faulty, I think.

I don't care for Heroku, but this is over the top: distributed systems are complicated, to build and especially to test. Even Google gets it wrong: http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2009/09/more-on-todays-gmail-i... is not entirely dissimilar.

How is it over the top? I am genuinely curious about their QA process. I am not judging them.

I don't know much about Google "process" but usually a company has a set of minimum rules about quality and code standards. The individual team usually have more rules on top of that.

Why? Cause everything depends on the type of problems that people have to face.

So to say that "Google gets it wrong" as the whole company doesn't seem to fit well. The "GMail" team didn't catch this one.

And I understand that testing is hard and certain things might not testable/doable. But to know how Google try to minimize the impact by doing "something" is far more important.