> In this case I think you are low-balling the estimate. To do it right it > isn't > sufficient to test one build against itself. You need to test new clients > against a range of old servers and vice versa in a constrained environment. > It is necessary to be able to identify when a change has an adverse > performance impact as well as accuracy. There is a need to be able to > introduce intentional errors at various points in the protocol. Just the > hardware costs are mid 5 digits and the software development is > significantly more than that.
I agree -- if you were starting from scratch, you're probably right. But, a) I wasn't starting from scratch, so the additional equipment for adding the AFS framework stuff was about what I quoted, and b) I was discussing our tooling and test setup, not the general case. We reused existing tooling in a number of places, and layered the AFS component onto that. We do this kind of thing for other software, so we had a decent baseline to start from. Solid QA infrastructure -- especially for complex systems -- isn't simple or cheap; there we agree wholeheartedly. :�� T���&j)b� b�өzpJ)ߢ�^��좸!��l��b��(���~�+����Y���b�ا~�����~ȧ~
