having to help Rev (was: Re: Memory Leak on export png????)

[Dave]

On 21 Mar 2007, at 18:29, Björnke von Gierke wrote:

>
> On 21 Mar 2007, at 18:47, Dave wrote:
>
>>
>> On 21 Mar 2007, at 15:17, Björnke von Gierke wrote:
>> ...
>
>> Actually we started the discussion at cross purposes I think. I  
>> was talking about first level soak (stress) testing in the  
>> development process before the code is checked in, before it goes  
>> to QA and *way* before it gets to beta stage.
>
> I know where you started, I'm neither knowledgeable nor interested  
> enough to comment on your low level techniques.
>
>> ...
>> Having said that, I really wouldn't mind doing the beta testing  
>> for free on a volunteer basis, but not as an expectation!
>
> The mentioned expectation of forcing people to be beta tester  
> hugely depends on three things:
>
> First, there's the expectation from the community, which can be  
> perceived this or that way. For me there are some community members  
> (as in any community) who want you to do as they would want to do  
> themselves. Mostly I ignore those. However, If the most verbose  
> members of a community expect the rest of the community to change  
> according to their own ideals, the community will rupture, dwindle,  
> die. So we as a community of Rev users must watch out for that.
>
> Secondly there's the expectation of RunRev to deliver meaningful  
> bug reports, if you make any. Also before that they want you to  
> look if the bug is already reported. I have no problem with that  
> whatsoever.
>
> The last and most important part of this is How you perceive a  
> message of a demand. This of course depends on the tone of the  
> demand, and how strongly it correlates with your own expectation.
> Imagine someone demanding from you to breathe. In most situations  
> you'd greatly agree, as you yourself deem breathing (vitally)  
> important. Now imagine someone telling you not to breathe. In most  
> situations that would run counter your own experience and  
> principles, and you would declare him stupid.
> The problem is that not all concepts are as all-encompassing for  
> every human as breathing. So what's one persons breathing bugs is  
> another persons not breathing bugs.
>
> Note: I don't want to say you belong to either of the breathing/non  
> breathing people. No one does. Almost every one is somewhere in  
> between these two extremes. As are you, or the people that demand  
> the filing of bugs of you.
>
>> I signed up for the Beta Program a while back, but I heard nothing  
>> for months, then a short while ago I was contacted with the  
>> details, unfortunately I don't have enough time now. When I signed  
>> up I could have put aside a couple of hours a day.
>
> See, you breathe "make beta's immediately after announcing them",  
> and someone else doesn't.

I really don't care if they are made available immediately or not.  
Would have been nice to have known what was going on, but after a few  
days and hearing nothing I forgot all about until it I got the  
message a week or so ago. If I have time I will do some testing, I  
had time then and I don't have time now. No problem, for me anyway. I  
only mentioned it since we were on the subject of being paid to do  
beta testing.

> You shouldn't ask yourself how to force the other person to breathe  
> what you breathe. If the situation bothers you, you should try to  
> find a form of breathing of which you think that both can agree  
> upon, and propose that to the other person. Of course that person  
> might still put you down, but the likelihood is probably  quite a  
> lot smaller.

I really don't want to force anyone to do anything! Most situations  
don't bother me! I found a horrible problem in RunRev that prevented  
me doing something. I spent 1.5 days trying to find a work around. A  
few people from this list also took a look at the problem. I am  
guessing that the whole thing probably took around 3 man days, Once I  
had found a work around I commented that stress testing at the  
development stage would have saved this time, the discussion then  
drifted into "beta" testing.

I suppose my point is that in order to have a beta test, you need to  
have gone thru the steps to get there. It's no good producing  
mountains of code, doing little or no testing at the development  
phase and then throwing that out for beta.

Another problem here is that people may have different ideas on what  
"Beta" means and I haven't seen it defined in terms of RunRev. One  
company I worked for defined it as meaning "Feature Complete, No  
Known Crashing Bugs".

To me. the three main stages of development are:

Development - Non feature complete may crash at any time.
Alpha - Not Feature Complete, with any known crashing bugs documented  
and workarounds for other problems.
Beta - Feature Complete, No Known Crashing bugs.

If a crashing bug is found in the Beta stage, then it reverts back to  
Alpha.

It would obviously be good to know what "Beta" means in terms of RunRev.

All the Best
Dave