Re: 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.

Jan

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