Path: chuka.playstation.co.uk!scea!peter_alau@playstation.sony.com From: Elliott Lee Newsgroups: scee.yaroze.freetalk.english Subject: Re: Major problem with my Yaroze! :( Date: Tue, 26 May 1998 22:47:15 -0700 Organization: SCEA News Server Lines: 56 Message-ID: <356BA8E3.D08FB062@netmagic.net> References: <6kbkav$hca19@chuka.playstation.co.uk> <356A2D9C.DBDF7AAB@netmagic.net> <6kecjs$hca25@chuka.playstation.co.uk> <356AF627.5811E536@cobite.com> <6kf0uh$lev2@chuka.playstation.co.uk> <356b4aff.15619810@news.scea.sony.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: ppp3-12.sj.netmagic.net Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.04 [en] (Win95; U) Matthew Hulett wrote: [...] > Never? That's impressive. I find it sad that companies now seem > resigned to release software that is bug-ridden, and that in America > they are considering rewriting contracts and warranties to say that if > their software screws up your drive's contents, your OS, etc... you > are on your own. > I can understand that there will always be unforseeable problems, > but when Win '98 locks up and crashes on Bill Gates, in a public > demonstration he gave a month ago, well, maybe an extra few months in > development could not hurt. It seems companies are happy to let the > public do their testing for them. You are absolutely correct. But you know what, it's not just the programmers nor their managers that cause these preventable mistakes from happening. It has to do with "time to market". The window of opportunity in the software industry is short. Anyone working in the games industry knows this all too well. True story: a couple nights ago at dinner in San Jose's Japantown I even met up with an Atari programmer who was on the Stun Runner team and also did some stuff for the Jaguar. His comment was that you just get the project out the door ASAP. So you get whatever showstopper bugs you can done and then ship the thing. The marketing guys have been pushing the product for months and they've already spent their millions. And now the board wants to see the product out on the shelves to get some positive cash flow. There's always time to fix your bugs, but not always enough time to get that first release out. How do you balance exponentially increasing complexity and yet maintain 100% robustness? Something's going to break somewhere. I write apps and I know I'm not perfect. I'm lucky if I get 70% of the errors out in a code base of 30K lines. (Consider now that an operating system has millions of lines.) :P I let the user community submit their bug reports as I carry out testing, hoping that I catch the big ones before they do. Often that's the only way... Now, that demonstration should have been rehearsed over and over to make sure nothing could go wrong. That was preventable and probably too rushed. Beats me why the tech crew didn't make that thing bulletproof. Heck, I would have had a couple of backup systems running in case of that. (During a rock concert, even the guitarists usually have at least 1 spare guitar.) > Mario was using the beta 3 release of Win '98, and he was a tester, > that's true. But I am convinced that in this atmosphere, people have > to be somewhat carefree to install the first or second release of any > program. Let others do the testing and have the pain... > > -Matt - e! tenchi@netmagic.net http://www.netmagic.net/~tenchi/yaroze/