On 25/02/2006, Garrett Hylltun <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> and Gregory Lypny <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote stuff.
Sorry to others for some repetitious elements in here but I see a couple of basic themes in the offerings from Garrett and Gregory (principally the former) which I wish to answer.
My credentials for so doing include not only the usual geological ages in and around software but particularly more than ten years spent observing or intervening in large scale projects which were off the rails and subject to commercial dispute, always involving millions to tens of millions of dollars. Problem management is, more or less, how I make my living. I also designed quality assurance facilities for a couple of government departments, one carrying a 2000-strong IT workforce and another doing highly critical defence work. The relevance of that is a high level of familiarity with what constitutes a faulty product to different people and how users' requirements are obtained, interpreted and implemented.
I understand Garrett to be saying that all bugs should be fixed and that the order of their repair is immaterial given the first assumption. His dissatisfaction with the failure of this desirable outcome is exacerbated by the perceived high price of the product.
However, Garrett fails to define a bug and there immediately is a massive problem. One person's bug is another person's feature request, a third person's "could not care less" and as often than not is unrelated to the software in question anyway (false report). This is unavoidable and and automatically renders any "fix all bugs" request as, well, just plain silly. I apologise for any personal offence anyone might take from that because I mean none, but there is really no other description for it. There will always be a range of items where their bug status is legitimately moot, so where do you "draw the line"? That is a matter of commercial dispute, of priority against demand and resources, of adequate bug definition and ultimately of agreement about where effort is most productively invested so that *both* parties are commercially successful.
The inexhaustible and infallible Alpha and Beta testing teams you seek do not exist outside the halls of Valhalla [or insert preferred paradise] and even there they are driven to drinking and argument. Incidentally, Gregory, "the same bug" will not, alas, appear in headers without human intervention and interpretation of the myriad descriptions, many of them fairly incompetent, of the potential bug.
For decades we have been grabbing developers and banging their heads against brick walls and steel pillars screaming "What about the customer's business needs!" So, how is it that RR will make all decisions on criticality of those bugs of which they are aware and which they choose to define as bugs? Their problem is not that they are too customer-driven with BZ, it is contrarily that it is damned hard to get some decent customer input. Even Dan, who is as experienced as anyone, confesses that he does not get motivated to use Bugzilla. Criticality, or priority, does matter. In a bank, if there were a bug which even in rare circumstances created an incorrect transaction then there would be a fix and release before virtually any other bug were managed in that software. Far from denigrating RR for exposing their bug data to entry and voting, we should be applauding their sound system and devising ways of making it more acceptable to users (as attempted by RZ).
One of the most reliable pieces of large scale software I know is OS/ 390 or z/OS in its current incarnation. It hosts a myriad of the most critical commercial and defence systems around the world. How much money would you like to lay down, Garrett, that its bug list has zero length? Or that every one on the list is always fixed by the next release, or that customers pay no licence fee to obtain fixes? It is a waste of time even to imagine it, or to borrow words from your own blog, it "is not science, it is nothing but pure religion."
Finally, the cost issue is not worth debating too much except for a couple of observations. My daughter is currently in Edinburgh and reports no stream of Ferrari Enzos racing about the Scottish hills while the RR office lies silent but for the flickering stream of bug reports. Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, however, have no problem affording such fripperies should they wish it, for they charge hundreds of dollars for software sold to millions or tens of millions, not to thousands.
Yet, every now and then, I see a window appear on my machine. It says: "Would you like to report this problem to Apple?"
regards David Director DVK Consult Pty Ltd _______________________________________________ use-revolution mailing list [email protected] Please visit this url to subscribe, unsubscribe and manage your subscription preferences: http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-revolution
