While sympathetic to the users impacted by the report output bugs, I am
distressed by all the hostility directed towards Millennia and even towards
fellow listers. Software development, including software testing, is not an
exact science. (It comes close only in certain life-critical military
applications, where incredible resources are devoted to avoiding bugs.)
I worked as a software tester and test manager for many years. It is
impossible to create and execute test cases for every function with every
combination of input conditions. So, you prioritize and do your best, and
you work with the developers to ensure that they are also following best
practices such as code reviews and unit testing. Since manual testing is so
expensive, many companies have developed suites of automated tests that can
be run, not only after major updates, but even after minor bug fixes. Still,
the automated test cases and test tools require an up-front investment. It
can take a small company years to evolve a good suite of automated test
cases and then to keep them up with all the changes and enhancements.
Manual or automated, the first priority for a product like Legacy is
probably to ensure that no data gets corrupted during data
entry/merge/repair. Avoiding crashes would also be very high. Where I have
worked, a higher priority was placed on ensuring that existing functions are
not broken than on ensuring that new features are perfect. It is possible
that the test team had test cases for direct report output, and perhaps for
output of simple reports to file formats such as RTF. It would appear that
they had insufficient test cases for output of more complex reports to RTF,
or chose not to re-execute them. By 'complex', I mean with various scenarios
for sources, footnotes, database size, formatting options, etc., etc.
The company management is responsible for funding an adequate test team (or
test 'effort', if it is being done by the developers), and for giving them
enough time to complete testing after most development is frozen. The senior
management cannot micro-manage the testers, but it can audit test coverage
analysis and bug open/close rates. There are constant financial and
technical trade-offs. Mistakes will be made and now and then a fairly
serious bug will 'escape' testing. Sometimes a bug is introduced at the last
minute by a fix to a different bug. Hopefully Millennia has learned a lot
from the V7 experience, as the business grows and as the product grows in
complexity.
We have seen a lot of good things from this company, including great
responsiveness to customer feedback over the years. Let's concentrate on
objective, detailed, and unemotional reporting of bugs and give Millennia a
chance to recover and to regain our trust.
Ward
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