I am a quality Analyst (tester) in RL. It doesn't make sense. No one puts
out a product and then says to their customers, I hope you guys test this
change real well. Obviously no one ever tested the levitate change on bards
at Verant at all, as even the simplest test of a bard's levitation would
have shown how badly flawed that change was. None of the companies I've
worked for would have retained a developer who follows these procedures.
Under certain situations you might have an internal user perform testing
after the regular testers had looked over something thoroughly in order to
find things the testers were not 'inventive' enough to try, but only when
those user testers were both monitored and responsible for feedback. Never
in my 15+ years of being a developer or a tester have we made a change and
then sent it on to a party outside the scope of the team and expected them
to test it for us. The project manager who tried such a stunt would have
been reading the help wanted ads within a day or so of making such a
decision.
It has less to do with developers having free time than it does with having
a responsible and organized system under which changes are implemented.
Verant uses the model of 'seat of the pants' change what you will
development. If something they think 'should' work goes in, then its up to
the customer to find the defects apparently. How much testing could they
possibly have done on the 'summon corpse' spell? It took 3 patches that
claimed to fix it before it was really fixed. Since it couldn't even be
cast before that it was pretty apparent no one ever tried to cast it. Its
been 20 years probably since that sort of 'it compiled so it must work'
style of development was acceptable in conventional development businesses.
Kit
-----Original Message-----
From: Kyle Sibbald [mailto:
ksibbald@...]
Sent: Thursday, January 06, 2000 6:31 AM
To:
eqbards@onelist.com
Subject: RE: [eqbards] EQ Testing Procedure
Being a programmer assigned to a Customer Service team where I work,
I can
understand this in a sense. A fix is made to a piece of code and now it must
be tested. Since the dev team does not have oodles of free time on their
hands, they cannot properly level a necro to the neccessary testing points
or they can't run scenarios through a variety of different spawn point
situations. (Take the whole shaman alchemy thing for example) They test a
few variations to make sure that it works as they expect. The other, and
more important thing that I have learned in situations like this is this.
The customer can always find more inventive ways of breaking something than
the coder can.
I think the other thing is that they are trying to make up for the
Levitate
'fix' that went in. They didn't mention the fix to anyone and it never
really got tested all that much on the test server. Then *wham*! Hello
Production. This actually makes a lot of sense in the testing world. A
tester would be told what was changed and asked to test it, not just told
that there may or may not be a change somewhere and be expected to test the
entire system.
Good Journey
Sineras Silverlyre, The Divine Alliance (Cazic-Thule)
-----Original Message-----
From: Kimes, Dean W. [mailto:
Dean_Kimes@...]
Sent: Thursday, January 06, 2000 2:58 AM
To: '
eqbards@onelist.com'
Subject: [eqbards] EQ Testing Procedure
Well, here you have it straight from the EQ team themselves. In an excerpt
from the test server:
Solution:
Ideally, Feign Death should work like Invisibility, where summoned pets
suicide and the charmed ones break Charm. We do not want, however, to
adversely affect lower level Necromancers to such a large degree. What we
do recognize is the need to prevent higher level Necros from exploiting key
spawn points. Hence, when you Feign Death, any charmed NPC will immediately
break Charm. However, summoned NPCs (pets) will not be affected. While
this still allows the use of the Feign Death tactic with your summoned pet,
it does not imbalance the game and many dungeon spawns to the degree that
charming an NPC does.
We would appreciate diligent testing of this change, to insure that no
unforeseen problems have been caused by it.
-The EverQuest Team
So now they are saying they would appreciate diligent testing of a change?
Wtf? Who is the customer and who is the service provider here? I guess
this tells us everything we need to know about Verant test procedure. Throw
the code out on the test server and hope some player puts it to task.
Kitasi
more disillusioned than ever
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