Am Mittwoch, 8. Februar 2006 11:16 schrieb Robert Schiele:
On Wed, Feb 08, 2006 at 09:26:41AM +0100, Stephan Kulow wrote:
You seem to misunderstand the phrases Beta and FACTORY. If you don't want to take part in testing and reviewing early development phases, I guess you're subscribed to the wrong mailing list.
Stephan, I think you are partially right here but partially wrong as well. It is correct that one has to expect things breaking in development or test releases. But nobody explained why this breakage has to be provided intentionally by removing the old method before the new method was in-place at all. Even when there is a reason for that it should be explained. The problem here was as well that this problem was known to responsible people (they even confessed that it was intentional) but not announced. Instead all people testing from outside SUSE hat to find themselves that the mechanism was broken.
Giving no information about such problems or giving the information very slowly provides the public with a very bad impression on what is going on. Typically I adhere to the saying: "Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity." --- If you don't want people think you are doing stupid things you should give them the chance to understand decissions that are not obviously correct and thus could be considered stupid.
So the whole story here is not about expecting or not expecting bugs in software but about not communicating known bugs and doing questionable decissions without explaining the reasons for the decissions. If you had reasons for the decissions and communicated them at least for the smart people it is likely that they accept them. If you didn't have reasons for the decission but there are known reasons against it the decission was obviously wrong and there is no point in blaming other people not having understood something completely unrelated.
Robert
Agreed, the whole point of a Beta test is to test the product is stable enough for release, so the users who join the Beta program should be searching through the program for areas which don't work properly so they can be tidied up before release... Therefore, they need to know what is new and what is know to have problems, without this information they are wasting their time. OK, Public Beta testing isn't like System Testing or User Testing for a custom application, so the beta testers aren't usually working from a test script to test specific areas, but they need to know what areas to give a specific look at. Also putting something new in late in the beta phase is not usually a smart thing to do. At this point in the development cycle we should be looking at a system which is relatively stable and the differences between the Beta releases should be bug fixes for what is already there. Major new functionality should be waiting for the internal development and first alpha releases... David