so I heard through the grapevine

that the gut feel of our (very experienced) QA lead is that we are about "a year away from shipping" our latest release.  As a senior developer with ownership over many of the new features including our new font engine http://www.baus.net/archives/000012.html, I feel we are in our last bug fixing round and will meet the year end deadline.  Has anyone seen such a difference of opinion in the state of the an application before?  Are developers optimists and QA folks pessimists at heart? 

This has lit a fire under my butt, and now I want to do everything possible to prove them wrong.  Which makes me think this is some sort of management conspiracy ; )

christopher baus (www.baus.net)
Saturday, November 8, 2003

"Are developers optimists and QA folks pessimists at heart?"

Yeah. 

On the bright side, sometimes many malfunctions are symptoms of the same bugs :-)

H. Lally Singh
Saturday, November 8, 2003

Lucky for you the decision on who is right is a strategic one left up to your able management. Of course, it helps to work on your case.

m
Saturday, November 8, 2003

The fact that two members of a product team have such wildly divergent opinions on the product's state of completion tells me that your spec is not detailed enough.  If it were, comparing the completed work to the spec would reveal exactly what remains to be done.

Norrick
Saturday, November 8, 2003

Norrick, the spec won't tell you how long it will take to stabilize the code.

The diverging opinions might come from the difference between how long it will take to get code complete (all features implemented) vs. how long it will take to actually ship (all major bugs found, triaged and fixed.)

Mike Treit
Saturday, November 8, 2003

The major features are in.  It is just after putting the features in you realize that the either performance of the feature is not acceptable, or a database handle garabage collection thread occasionally aborts the application, or some portion of the macro engine doesn't work with specific graphic types.

You usually don't put bugs in the spec. 

My theory is that certain bugs can look much worse than they actually are.  A really sinister, difficult to fix bug, might be difficult to reproduce, yet a easy to fix bug might effect the application at all over place and give the impression that the application is in poor condition.

christopher baus (www.baus.net)
Saturday, November 8, 2003

It sounds like a communications breakdown. It's possible that QA found some serious issues but haven't told you. Or, they're worried about something that's easy to fix. Have a face-to-face conversation and figure out what's going on.

The other possiblity is differing standards regarding the quality necessary before releasing. If months of testing without finding any bugs are viewed as mandatory, it will take a year to ship.

Julian
Saturday, November 8, 2003

Please fix your server
"This is your custom 404 "Not found" Error page. This page is displayed whenever a file that a web browser requests is not found on your website.

If you would like to change this page, edit the file "404.html" in your "www" dir.

Important!!!!

If you use Microsoft Internet Explorer, please read this important article about "404" pages. It will save you a lot of frustration! "

Force IE5 to display your 404 and not its own

You may also wish to read this article:

click here for Microsoft Knowledge Base article

Chen
Saturday, November 8, 2003

If your experienced QA person thinks you're a year away from shipping, LISTEN TO HIM!!!

Go talk to him, tell him you've heard this, and ask him what he thinks needs to be fixed. It certainly won't hurt to ask, and you may find out something you didn't know.

Chris Tavares
Saturday, November 8, 2003

I think the 404 error is really a bug in Joel's URL recognition.  It includes a comma as part of the URL.

http://www.baus.net/archives/000012.html

christopher baus (www.baus.net)
Sunday, November 9, 2003

Chris,

I just found this out on Friday, again indirectly.  I am going to find out what his concerns are on Monday.  My feel is the bugs look worse to QA than they actually are.  They 100% black box testing.  I wish we could budget in a white box tester, but that seems unlikely.

christopher

christopher baus (www.baus.net)
Sunday, November 9, 2003

_dont_ fight this.  The QA guy will know, and if hes wrong and yo uare right then all will be well anyway, but if it turns out that something unforeseen happens and you are wrong and he is right, you'r egoing to look pretty bad after fighting for the earlier release date.

FullNameRequired
Monday, November 10, 2003

I'm not planning on fighting it.  I'm just planning on making it ; )

christopher baus (www.baus.net)
Monday, November 10, 2003

So what happened?

Wednesday, November 12, 2003

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