I sure hope to `conversation' is interesting to more than just the two of us!
>overwhelming source of the ``real'' problems. Unfortunately, low customer pressure has given that industry the >complete opposite behaviour: new features need to be put in, even at the cost of quality, to insure that renewal $$$ >come in.
Industry responding to customer demand. Why do people think that companies selling software based products should not act in a way that maximises their profits? Another topic of research for ppigers!
Ah, but here we have highly skewed market forces: the people who pay the money for the software (in the case of large site licenses) do not use the software, or even have a clue of what the software does. So money is not a proper feedback mechanism about the software - merely about the sales mechanism.
About psychology: I don't know if others have this experience, but when I talk to users of the products I used to work on, all of them have their private 'cache' of bugs they have encountered, bugs that have seriously frustrated them, but also bugs that they have *never reported*! Quite a lot of those bugs had never in fact been reported by anyone.
Backwards compatibility. Customers love it, developers hate it. Customers pay developer salaries.....
Customers hate bugs too. But a fair number of those bugs are due to design mistakes. Fixing the design mistake would introduce an incompatibility (witness Windows XP SP2).
So the question is: what is more important, quality or compatibility?
Now customers don't pay open source developer salaries. I wonder how many often used open source tools will break backwards compatibility in future releases?
Linux and gcc have broken compatibility several times [gcc not on input, but on properties of the output]. Some programming languages break compatibility (at least binary compatibility) at every release, and language compatibility once in a while. Perl is just about to do this.
Jacques
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