New patch announcement at .com

[TheDuck]

I'm not interested in a p*****g contest but I've done software development as well, and I generally had a decent idea of how reasonable or unreasonable a change might be. I'm not concerned about the precise number of lines of code (who cares?) but rather the difficulty of the task. Following my instincts has worked well in the past, I'll stick with them, thank you very much. A lot of these problems have been solved before by CA. I would be shocked and disappointed if they could not be repeated. Look at how many simple sign error type problems are already present in this release of RTW. Those are very easy fixes.

And I'll refer to my missive above. Part of the discipline of a good engineering organization is good processes that provide feedback on what is fixed, and where. The organization I work in currently has poor processes for those things, with the unfortunate consequence that code bugs can be propogated across different release levels. Since in my job I'm much nearer the lower rung than the upper (very large company), and since upper level management controls such things, my chances of changing things to get better quality control over our releases is small, but locally I've had some effect on these things.

The good part about CA is that its a small company. The bad part is that its technical management must not be tracking such things, otherwise you wouldn't have bug migration such as you have (rightly) observed in the current release.

I've heard too many people in the past say that 'it must be easy'. After 21 years I've learned that those statements rarely track to truth. Hence my comment to you. I believe that good disciplined engineering and the processes for guaranteeing quality in it is one of the most difficult jobs you can have. So many things can go wrong.. and only experience will get you out of 90% of the associated issues.

Again, and in the positive for CA.. they've got a track record of 'making things right'. That is what is important to me, and why I bought RTW, knowing full well the first release would be buggy.

And, I've not 'done software engineering'. I 'do' software engineering, and have been front line development for 21 years. I've seen the good, the bad and the ugly. Its easy to think you understand how software development really works. I meet programmers that think this everyday. My job in the last 5 years has been to correct those folks on what they think they know vs. what reality dishes out. That difference is between a new programmer who tries to create good code, and an trained engineer that knows he will create poor code and plans to catch that lack of quality through good processes.