On Wed, Sep 03, 2008 at 11:33:30AM -0500, Graham Barr wrote:
> On Sep 3, 2008, at 9:26 AM, David Golden wrote:
> > So do we count this as a win for CPAN Testers? ;-)
> Sort of, due to the fact the bug did get fixed.
> But the FAIL is record in the wrong place. It gets counted as a FAIL
> in the distribution because the tester had issues building it that
> were not really the fault of the distribution.
IMO including Weird Stuff in the distribution that causes CPAN.pm to
throw a fit is a problem with the distribution. Even though the latest
dev release of CPAN.pm will hide the problem, users who don't stay on
the bleeding edge (that's nigh-on all of them) will still see this
happen, and still wonder why on earth your module won't install.
Anyway, it counts as a win because all the relevant people now know that
there is a problem and what it is. But it's only a win because the
module author queried the report. Without having done that, only he
would know that there was something weird happening.
Dragging this back specifically onto the subject of QA - quality
assurance is an iterative process, with feedback.
If, like one of my previous employers, you make widgets, you test
completed widgets, you analyse how they fail, the analyst suggests
how to improve the manufacturing process to prevent a common failure,
and TPTB then ignore his report - then "Quality Assurance: you're
doing it wrong".
My manager's response to my analysis that they'd not be doing anything
is another case of "I don't care why it happens".
(Actually we didn't make widgets - we made things that tell other things
where to go Boom. Scary.)
--
David Cantrell | Hero of the Information Age
All children should be aptitude-tested at an early age and,
if their main or only aptitude is for marketing, drowned.
