Kyle,
Guess I should have offered more credentials before speaking about
programming/debug techniques to qualify my concerns.
I am a retired IS professional who was a MCSE, and retired as a
fully qualifed IBM Systems Programmer. I started in programming long
before the PC was even a glimmer on the personal horizon as an
assembler programmer. I worked on most of the
Mini-computers of that era before entering the mainframe arena. I
worked on development progjects like sequential
processing delivery for Arpanet (what is now referred to as The
Internet). I built my own 8080 personal computer,
etiched my own motherboard for it (it worked!) and coded assembler
Great, I cut my teeth on Assembler too. But things have changed a
lot since then. At one time it was not a large matter to slap
together a DOS based pop email client that only did a few things.
I understand the risks of using a development system, but as I
stated before, even with a deveopment effort, there has
to be structure to deveopment or you end up shooting yourself in
the foot too many times (been there, done that). My
point here is that to effectivey assist in deveopment, there
needs(has to be) a base line of stability (regression
style never works well) so that testers can effectively test new
code paths. If the base changes with each feature
inclusion, where is the base for metrics?
We aren't doing any metrics. I suspect that what will happen over
the next several months is that with out help, TB will come to a
level of stability where it can be called a beta, and then testing
can be more like you describe.
I think the eseential thing to notice here was that, for a long time,
Rit made no new test releases, and people complained. We want to be
included in what is happening. So, Rit decided to start releasing
alphas. Now people complain that what we are getting is not up to
our personal standard of what is testable. Would it feel better if
Rit called them pre-alphas? Or should they go back to not making any
more releases until they have a real beta for us?
--
Gleason
Using 4.0.0.17 (ALPHA) on Windows XP, 5.1, Build 2600.
IMAP email provider is Fastmail, which uses Cyrus server software.
Current beta is 4.0.0.17 | 'Using TBBETA' information:
http://www.silverstones.com/thebat/TBUDLInfo.html
