On Mon, 23 Jun 2003, Dann Corbit wrote:
> [Dann Corbit wrote a lot] > [...]
It may be reassuring to think your product is very well tested before it goes out the door, but it's a false security, proven over and over by commercial products that simply don't work in the field because of problems that the original designers never envisioned, and now that they have a thorough and long drawn out testing cycle, it simply takes longer and longer to get fixes, while providing little, if any, improvement in quality.
Scott, it's worse.
It's been back in the early 90's, when we had WfW-3.11 systems with some MS-Word dinosaur, and we just lost 14 days of work because it simply crashed on loading the document. The Microsoft support solution was something that lost all the formatting, indexing and cross references of a structured 250 page concept. I don't remember the exact procedure as my brain cells did overcharge, but the dummy on the hotline really believed that their thoroughly tested software wasn't the problem and that the error lies within our document. That that was a file, written by their thoroughly tested software was a point she really didn't catch.
This dumb hotline girl is the type of people, Dann Corbit's test strategy will reassure. Plus maybe a few (unfortunately important but otherwise useless) managers. Other than that, it'll not make the life of the average DBA any better. Big amounts of useless tests just give otherwise clueless people the false impression, the error must be somewhere else. MySQL's crash-me is a perfect example for that.
Jan
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