> -----Original Message----- > From: Jan Wieck [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] > Sent: Monday, June 23, 2003 10:10 PM > To: scott.marlowe > Cc: Dann Corbit; Bruce Momjian; Tom Lane; Jason Earl; > PostgreSQL-development > Subject: Re: [HACKERS] Two weeks to feature freeze > > > scott.marlowe wrote: > > On Mon, 23 Jun 2003, Dann Corbit wrote: > > [Dann Corbit wrote a lot] > > [...] > > It may be reassuring to think your product is very well > tested before > > it > > goes out the door, but it's a false security, proven over > and over by > > commercial products that simply don't work in the field because of > > problems that the original designers never envisioned, and > now that they > > have a thorough and long drawn out testing cycle, it simply > takes longer > > and longer to get fixes, while providing little, if any, > improvement in > > quality. > > Scott, it's worse. > > It's been back in the early 90's, when we had WfW-3.11 > systems with some > MS-Word dinosaur, and we just lost 14 days of work because it simply > crashed on loading the document. The Microsoft support solution was > something that lost all the formatting, indexing and cross > references of > a structured 250 page concept. I don't remember the exact > procedure as > my brain cells did overcharge, but the dummy on the hotline really > believed that their thoroughly tested software wasn't the problem and > that the error lies within our document. That that was a > file, written > by their thoroughly tested software was a point she really > didn't catch. > > This dumb hotline girl is the type of people, Dann Corbit's test > strategy will reassure. Plus maybe a few (unfortunately important but > otherwise useless) managers. Other than that, it'll not make > the life of > the average DBA any better. Big amounts of useless tests just give > otherwise clueless people the false impression, the error must be > somewhere else. MySQL's crash-me is a perfect example for that.
Do you really believe that such disasters were the result of careful testing before release? Everyone who thinks a careful test plan and implementation is a bad idea is very, very wrong. IMO-YMMV. ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 7: don't forget to increase your free space map settings
