On Thu, Dec 02/99, "Kimes, Dean W." <Dean_Kimes@...> wrote:

> From: "Kimes, Dean W." <Dean_Kimes@...>
>
> >If (and I'm not sure it would be worth it yet) bards are going to
> >protest with a sit in, it should be over the testing issue, not this
> >specific incident. It really looks like either they don't have someone
> >at Verant who "owns" bards, both from a programming and testing
> >standpoint, or if they do, it's someone who is incompetent or doesn't
> >care.

> Actually I'd say this is the case regarding testing in general, not just
> bard testing. Its merely more amplified since no one plays bards regularly
> on the team. I have seen zero evidence they ever test anything, and much
> evidence to the contrary. They seem to have the typical old school (and I
> mean really old, like 25+ years ago) mentality of, "Hey it compiled ok.
> Testing complete."

I'm not sure it's the developers totally at fault on this one either.
Unfortunately, I think once the game went live, the accountants took
over and I strongly suspect that the development group is on a very low
maintenance budget now. The speed at which changes are made, and the
problems they seem to have even understanding the code they are changing
really seems to point to them having very few people working on
maintenance, and, lower quality programmers than the people who actually
wrote the game to begin with. If they still had the original development
team, I'd say at the rate and reliability they are currently fixing
problems, they never would have shipped the game even after 4 years in
development.

One glaring example is the simple addition of the optional download
query they added to the client. It took the programmer two tries to get
the current dialog and even there the buttons aren't even correctly
aligned on the dialog box.

--
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