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Subject: Re: I think ChessBase products fail!

Author: Gordon Rattray

Date: 06:57:58 12/26/01

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On December 26, 2001 at 02:19:11, pavel wrote:

>On December 25, 2001 at 18:50:37, Pete Melissakis wrote:
>
>>On December 25, 2001 at 18:20:58, pavel wrote:
>>
>>>Based upon what did you ome to the above conclusion?
>>>
>>>Every new experiment (F7server) and new release (F7, S7) has bugs, which later
>>>gets fixed by ussual service pack, and it is a true fact for almost all
>>>software, let alone chessbase.
>>>
>>>Chessbase is still the best chess software company out there, with S6 and CT14
>>>in its bags now, it has been more than just a fact.
>>>
>>>pavs
>>
>>I agree with you Pavel. But I wonder why we have to always be
>>satisfied with such buggy software just because
>>"everybody else does it" If I recall correctly that is what
>>almost ruined the US auto industry.
>>
>>Pete
>
>
>well i cant answer your question here, because I am not a commericla programmer,
>but what I can tell you that it can be really tough to write any program thats
>completely bugfree.


As a commercial programmer, I know that it is impossible to write any
significant piece of software that is bug free.  However, this is not an excuse
to release a piece of software that has many *obvious* and *fundamental* bugs in
it.

Many pieces of software have to complete an acceptance test before being
released and this test should cover all fundamental functionality.  So, I'm not
convinced by the level of testing that Chessbase performs.  It shouldn't be
accepted as a "fact of life" - it's poor software engineering.

If the system I work on has any fundamental bugs at the time of release, the
customer can refuse to accept it and can penalise us financially (thousands of
dollars per day) until we get such bugs fixed.  Hence, we focus strongly on
testing.  Our releases do of course still contain bugs, but these tend to be
very subtle (hard to detect during testing), minor and in low numbers.

Gordon



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