Sunday 3 May 2009

Quality?

I’ve been using Delphi 2009 for about a month now, and for the most part I’m happy. Unfortunately that’s only because when you’ve been disappointed so many times, you’re grateful when you get an IDE that doesn’t crash every 5 minutes. Seriously though, so far so good. (one thing is driving me nuts though. I’ll post about it later)

So there are a few bugs. I’m a developer, and I’ve been around long enough to know that every piece of software, however good the process and the people behind it, has bugs. So I’m under no illusions here. While no bugs would be nice, I know it’s not realistic. But here’s my gripe of the day! Why does it take so long to fix the bugs?

Whilst I expect bugs in a product, I don’t expect to wait 6 months after it’s release, for those bugs to be fixed. Some of the bugs I’ve found in TDictionary lead me to believe the code was not tested. Already not a very good sign. But hey, things fall through the cracks, we’re only human right? The thing is some of those bugs are so easy to fix, that any junior developer, just out of college, could find them, and fix them in an afternoon. So why 6 months later, are we still waiting? I don’t understand it?

And it’s not like Codegear don’t know about these bugs. They’ve been reported in Quality Central for a while. Oh and that’s another thing. If you’re going to charge me for your software (fair enough), and then use me as a tester,  please, oh please make it easy for me to tell you about bugs in your software. I have to go to the Codegear website. If I’m lucky, I’ve got my username and password written on a piece of paper somewhere, if not, I have to click on the lost password link. Wait for the email, fish it out from my spam folder. Then I’m not sure what you have to do, because I never got that far. Why can’t I just highlight some code in Delphi, right click, and choose report a bug. Put in a little description, and that’s it? You have my details as I use a registered copy.

As you can tell, I’m impatiently waiting for update 3? Where is it guys?

4 comments:

Moritz Beutel said...

> Why can’t I just highlight some code in Delphi, right click, and choose report a bug. Put in a little description, and that’s it?

You can, sort of. In the IDE, go to "Tools|QualityCentral", enter your credentials and there you go.

Chris Alexioy said...

The point is that you have to pay for the next version to see some bug fixes. See after Delphi 2009, Delphi 2007 has no more bug fixes. Why?
"CodeGear / Embarcadero" push their customers to change to other development tools. Why?
My opinion is that Delphi is dying slowly day by day. Why?
We love Delphi and we are very disappointed to know that CodeGear don’t cares about this.

develdevil said...

Let's not be to severe we our breadwinning tool...
... and give "Nick" a chance to boost it up.

nevertheless:
if we all were good enough and at least as good programmers as we actually expect CodeGear's people to be, then we'd all work for CodeGear and ensure Delphi is bug free...

Ughh ?
There must be a bug in my approach !
I need a SP - HELP !!!
:)

@Babnik:
I agree with you: everything >6 months w/o at least a schedule for the fixes is far from "Good quality".

Alister Christie said...

While having easy to fix bugs hang around for six months is rather unacceptable, The quality of Delphi has been improving steadily since D2005 and this improvement doesn't seem to be slowing down. However CodeGear is going to have to do some pretty spectacular stuff to gain market share back from M$ - and I certainly hope they are able to.