RE: Word to the wise

["McLauchlan, Kevin" <Kevin -dot- McLauchlan -at- safenet-inc -dot- com>]

Bill Swallow asked:

> Easy solution: Forward John's e-mail to said penny-pincher with a note
> that says "Is a $n purchase for a tool that will validate my syntax
> worth potentially shipping a defective product"?
> 
> And John, where was QA? Don't you have people do final release
> candidate testing to find glaring problems like these before the
> product leaves the company?
My experience of QA (in more than one company) is that they are as
resource-constrained as anybody else, so they would likely have gone
through the process of a customer's first/main experience of the
product, and would therefore have been following the sequence of pages
that guided the user through configuration or basic admin procedures,
but would not necessarily have visited more obscure or advanced pages.
At the end of the QA cycle, they would just visit a quick,
representative sample of pages. If those were OK, the assumption is that
the previous successful use of the product and its Help have not been
broken.

There's a reason that QA in the aircraft industry, some of the medical
equipment industry, and (one hopes) the nuclear industry, takes so much
longer and the whole process of getting a product ready for release can
take years, instead of the weeks-or-months that the rest of us often
have.

But on the other hand, while I agree that the company should be paying
for the necessary tools, aren't there FOSS validators out there?

Kevin

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