On Sun, 3 Mar 2013 21:39:59 -0500, Robert A. Rosenberg wrote: >At 08:54 -0600 on 03/03/2013, Paul Gilmartin wrote about Me? (was: >SAVE macro, I think): > >>And I have known IBM support to reply to my minimal test >>case similarly to, "Why do you need this program to work? >>It appears to do nothing useful." > >After getting this type of blow-off reply to a submission of a >minimal demo,in future problem submissions I always added extra >comment documentation to the start of the code to acknowledge that >the code did not do anything useful EXCEPT demonstrate the >problem/bug - Thus cutting short the first round-trip for the >usefulness query. > Another variant I got once was, "Are you seriously developing an application, or are you just testing?" I replied, somewhat snarkily, "Testing, but not 'just testing'. I consider testing an essential part of software quality assurance. Apparently IBM believes otherwise."
In honesty, sometimes when reading a description of a feature, perhaps a new one, in a manual, I think, "It would be difficult, perhaps logically impossible, to code that feature to operate as described, particularly in some boundary condition." So, out of intellectual curiosity, I code a test case to exercise such a boundary condition. Usually, I'm pleasantly surprised that the feature works as described. If not, I submit a PMR. Where's the Black Team when you need them? -- gil ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
