I work in a relatively small team of developers on a behemoth of a project that's been ongoing for a few years. Recently (last year) a permanent project manager had been assigned to the team, however this PM is particularly rigid in the way she does things, ignores the team and schedules things much further in advance of when things should be done (by orders of weeks, if not months).
A particularly large feature (let's call this feature A) that was started development in March. Towards the end of the build cycle, the client made a decision that would delay the feature we were building for them until the following year. Developers were taken off it in favour of other "higher priority" pieces of work, causing the build of this feature to be slowed to basically a snail's pace. These other pieces have since been built and released.
Every so often in the "schedule" is a 2-3 hour block of someone's time to address whatever's needed to be done on this branch, putting the final supposed release of this feature sometime in January.
In the meantime, developers are working on other features that will be released first which will likely cause a lot of conflicts. The extent of this will only really be known when the release time of feature A comes around.
My concern is that, when feature A's time comes and we've merged these other changes in so that it can go live, we'll end up having to re-build either feature A, or a combination of B, C and D, which will then require it to go back up to QA for a full re-test - something they apparently don't have time to do. Whatever the case, it probably won't be a simple merge.
I've attempted to communicate this to the project manager on a few occasions, and the team will back me up with the concerns raised. However her "schedule" is extremely rigid
When I brought this up in scrum this morning, I told that the schedule "is what it is", and that she doesn't appreciate having things suggested that QA can complete that she doesn't want to happen.
Effectively, she's shelved the release of feature A, yet again, for the foreseeable future. The friction from all of this causes a lot of stress and anger within the team.
Having brought this up, what are the next steps to getting this out of the door in a timely manner so that the resulting mess of not doing so is avoided?