On Feb 29, 2012, at 9:57 AM, Jean-Daniel Dupas wrote: Le 29 févr. 2012 à 13:56, Andrew Satori a écrit : You need to spend time in the "good" ones then. The same issues exist.
That's wrong. I don't know any IDE but Xcode that force me to hard reboot my machine 10 times a day. And yes, I have a bug opened about this issue.
As a guy who ran one of the Shockwave QA and beta programs back in the mid/late '90s, it's simply hard for me to spend the time to enter a bug. There is no guarantee that my time will be spent well. I know I'm not going to be notified if the bug is to have any resolution. If the bug is closed, marked a dup, will be addressed, or not, I'm never going to know. For me to write up a proper bug report that doesn't waste the developer's time, then I have to spend a lot of time. But I'm never going to get an answer and that leaves the users in a bad state.
Now, this is not normally possible, for time and corporate image factors, but here is what I did, and why it matters.
I got on the Director listserv email lists in 1994/1995 and said this:
"Hey guys, we're going to do this new product that's going to allow you to take your CD ROM product, modify it (a lot) and deliver it (to some extent) over this new 'Internet' thing. I'm willing to open this up to you guys. If you want to be part of the Beta for Shockwave, then you will need to be able to report the bugs and issues to me as if I were 3 years old and give me the code that is causing the problem in a simple case (remember, I'm not next to your desk and have no idea what's going on). In turn, what I will do is PERSONALLY enter your bugs in our database and make sure they get looked at. To the best of my ability, I'll tell you if something's going to be fixed or not, so you can find a work around if needed. The point here is that you are not submitting requests to a black hole.
I'm going to set up a new list, Shocker-L and will be monitoring the list on a daily (hourly) basis. Lemmie know if you want to join by sending me an email and I'll put on the Shockwave Beta program, but I expect you to participate. Please feel free to email me directly."
So, we did this, and I ran the whole effort. We increased out QA effort by a factor of THREE with no additional staff and got out a much better product (on Windows first, then the Mac) than we ever could have hoped without this openness.
We were not apologetic or spinmeisters (well, one other great very knowledgeable guy sadly was), we called a bug a bug, we addressed them, some were not fixed, but we ended up putting out the product that really created multimedia on the internet and it was enough to keep Macromedia in business for time after the CD ROM market tanked.
We had a following for quite a while until Flash took over and it was good for the company and good for our users.
Then Rob Burgess put the dev team in the basement and it took Steve Jobs to ask Macromedia to put out an OS X version of Director. Then several teams in India cratered it and turned it into a bad Windows port.
But the point was that the open QA program made sure the product wasn't a complete barge of garbage and it was simply badly needed and IMHO, a stellar, non traditional and very successful way to do it.
Cheers, - Alex Zavatone
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