You're where and doing what?

My project is careening towards the end-of-March implementation date. We're into test mode, finally, and putting all the pieces together. This phase is supposed to be two parts - IT testing/integration, followed by business area testing. Once everything's through, we move things into the production system and flip the switch. The original plan called for IT having the system for one month (February), then the business folks getting their paws on it for March.

Like I said, the original plan. Business didn't like that. They want to see things "right away" and of course they aren't ready yet. We manage to fend them off with "OK, you can have it for the last week in February, and if we're ready sooner, you'll have it sooner."

So what happened a week and a half ago (check your calendars)? You guessed it, the business people are testing. They're not supposed to be. They're reporting bugs that aren't really bugs because that piece isn't wired yet. Or we haven't cleared out all the old, bad test data and they're looking at something from 3 months ago.

But the worst came this week. Now they're panicking and throwing out questions because they don't know how things work. Things they spec'd out. Things they asked for. Things we did to make their lives easier. Now I'm undoing some of those features.

But maybe some good will come of it. I decided that rather than hold everyone's hand, I'll just cram them all in a room and explain the whole thing to them. We're supposed to have training for the end-users before they start using this application. Why are we not doing the same for the testers? Why let them file imaginary bugs simply because they don't understand how things work?