Great posting, Erland. > There isn't a specification that describes how it is supposed to work, > much of the functionality seems to be in the head of different people.
Logitech SMBU isn't SlimDevices any more. At the time there were Sean, Dean and a few enthusiasts. They did the hardware, the software, the marketing, sales... Today we're part of a large company. There's worldwide marketing, sales, hardware engineering, software etc. all in different departements, all with many people working there. This doesn't simplify or speed up communication, that's for sure. > There aren't any official test cases available to the beta testers, so > it's very hard for the beta testers and volunteers to do any structured > testing without inventing the wheel themselves. That's something we definitely want to improve. > Some parts of the code isn't automated tested, some because it's hard > to do automated testing on it and some because no one has bothered yet. > Automated test is really the best way to do testing on all > functionality. Another point QA's working on. Eg. the file scanning needs automated testing to recognize regression in eg. character set issues early. We're trying to build the world's largest collection of broken music files :-). > So what can we do ? > ==================== > - Complain in the forum and tell the Logitech people how to do the work > like I just did ? This really doesn't help much because I'm pretty sure > they already know what the problem is. Thank you, thank you, thank you. > I'm guessing that's the reason it > hasn't been done already is because they've had to prioritize other > things. Correct. Product development often is a trade-off between cost and quality. Somebody mentioned development of an airplane control system. That's not the mass market product you want to be selling for a few hundred bucks. You've got more time and resources for quality. But if you want to sell a 200USD device you can't afford hundreds of developers, QA guys etc. We're working hard to make our products the best product you can have for the money. And that's no easy task. > - Letting Logitech know if you think the quality is to low so they know > if they have to improve or not. However, remember that it's always up to > Logitech to decide if it's worth the cost or not. Sometimes it's easier > to raise the income by adding more functionality than raising the > quality of existing functionality. Somebody explain the 80/20 rule... > - Ask Logitech to stop the development for a year and only focus on > testing every functionality that already exists ? With the result that > the competition catches up and leaves Logitech behind... You can ask us to do this. But then new product sales are better money than improved quality in already sold devices... it's a sad fact we're fighting with marketing every day. > - Buy more Squeezebox devices so Logitech can afford to add more people > to their test team. That's definitely the way to go :-). -- Michael _______________________________________________ discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/discuss
