Re: Two weeks to feature freeze

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Jan Wieck [mailto:JanWieck(at)Yahoo(dot)com]
> 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.