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I was unsuccessful in convincing him that software crashes get in the way of user productivity. He so accustomed to crashes he not believe another model exists. Fortunately he long gone from my employer.
I had another boss who came from the mainframe background who criticized me because I was delivering solutions to user requests in a few days ... he said that I was teaching them that fast solutions were doable, that if I can get something done in a week, I should promise 6 months, like Star Trek Scottie on steroids, except actually hold the result and not release it until the longer time period. This was at a former employer.
I was unsuccessful in explaining to him the principle of user rising expectations ... we get a handshake on what is desired ... I go off and start developing it ... they think about what is coming and unconsciously embellish, then if I make delivery 2 months later, it no longer matches their expectations, but if I ask them to test a partial solution real soon, this embellishing never starts with respect to something different from what I was supposed to do. Also, by launching the new app in pieces, as soon as a piece is ready, the company gets the benefit of the new stuff, instead of waiting until the whole thing is done, and the training needed for the individual pieces is quite user-friendly compared to launching a whole new app.
As for BPCS, yes there are microscopically few bugs, but some of them are repeated 10,000 times in the same program, such as rounding in costing and billing, a bug that got there thanks to platform-agnosticism. (We are on mixed mode version 405 CD)
- Al Macintyre http://www.ryze.com/go/Al9Mac BPCS/400 Computer Janitor ... see http://radio.weblogs.com/0107846/stories/2002/11/08/bpcsDocSources.html
The number of bugs in a single Microsoft program is higher than we allowed in all of BPCS during the System/38 days. Heck, the number of security alerts in Windows is higher than the number of bugs of all kinds we had in BPCS. I truly believe that the lowered standards of the general community as it pertains to software can be almost entirely attributed to Microsoft. Prior to the ability of Microsoft to shove bad code down people's throats through unfair business practices, bad code (and bad programmers) didn't survive. Now people are USED to rebooting, and to reinstalling, and to software crashing and behaving incorrectly and counter-intuitively. And that's just plain sad. Joe > From: Walden H. Leverich > > Granted, the barrier to entry in the PC market is so low that any schmoe > can write and release code, but you can't blame a programmer's stupidity > on MS.
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