Re: Two weeks to feature freeze

Dann Corbit wrote:
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Jan Wieck [mailto:JanWieck@Yahoo.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.

No, I do not.

But again, where is your "careful test plan" please? All I have seen 
from you so far is asking us to provide you with a careful test plan 
while dancing carefully around every single attempt to get a look at 
what you got so far.

I have written PostgreSQL regression tests. I have done consistency 
checks of entire ERP systems prior to data conversion attempts. I know 
the value of tests, whether they are against software or data. May I ask 
what you've done so far?

I personally think you don't actually ever did any software testing 
yourself. You are not really talking from experience, are you? So 
please, show me what you have now, or get one more plus on my minus-list.


Jan

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