24 replies to this topic

[najaru_1]

what is this?

[ΑndyF]

These are a small team chosen from active customers who help to pretest releases before they appear for general beta testing.

[najaru_1]

ok thanks.
maybe better to put a little link as contributor badge

[Dmacleo]

feel free to add me

[TheRevTastic]

ok thanks.
maybe better to put a little link as contributor badge

Theres nothing really to link to.

[ZakRhyno]

Don't you love when things are change and nothing is said.

[Rhett]

Nothing has changed... there has been a QA team for some time now....however the badge raises awareness, hence this thread... and we are always looking for good people to test as well.

[ZakRhyno]

I'm speaking about adding the badges to there profiles, when they post.

[Dmacleo]

feel free to add me

Nothing has changed... there has been a QA team for some time now....however the badge raises awareness, hence this thread... and we are always looking for good people to test as well.

<clears throat>...
just sayin'

[TheRevTastic]

<clears throat>...
just sayin'

They ask you :|

I'm speaking about adding the badges to there profiles, when they post.

It was brought up in the contributor badge topic in the customer lounge .

[Megami Community]

it's "Quality Assurance", i.e., QA. lols

[insectdude]

Does the now-official QA team mean the end of publicly available (to active customers) beta tests?

Gallery 4.2, for example, was not made generally available in beta form as far as I am aware - at least not for any sensible length of time. Judging by the bug tracker, that appears to have been a bad decision (there are 4 confirmed "critical" status bugs for 4.2.0 on the first page alone). As a result I personally am treating 4.2.0 as a beta and have no intention of installing it on my live site.

[TheRevTastic]

Does the now-official QA team mean the end of publicly available (to active customers) beta tests?

Gallery 4.2, for example, was not made generally available in beta form as far as I am aware - at least not for any sensible length of time. Judging by the bug tracker, that appears to have been a bad decision (there are 4 confirmed "critical" status bugs for 4.2.0 on the first page alone). As a result I personally am treating 4.2.0 as a beta and have no intention of installing it on my live site.

They will upgrade to the latest versions on the forums before releasing so that it can also be tested out here but with more uses then a single person can give in a test of the product.

[insectdude]

They will upgrade to the latest versions on the forums before releasing so that it can also be tested out here but with more uses then a single person can give in a test of the product.

Does that mean the answer to the question in my first sentence is "yes" then?

Upgrading this site doesn't help with public testing of anything that requires ACP access or non-standard permissions. As ever with testing, the more people that have the opportunity to install the software, the more likely that bugs will be found prior to release.

[Collin S.]

Does the now-official QA team mean the end of publicly available (to active customers) beta tests?

Gallery 4.2, for example, was not made generally available in beta form as far as I am aware - at least not for any sensible length of time. Judging by the bug tracker, that appears to have been a bad decision (there are 4 confirmed "critical" status bugs for 4.2.0 on the first page alone). As a result I personally am treating 4.2.0 as a beta and have no intention of installing it on my live site.

Nothing has changed. We've always had a QA team - the only thing that's new is the badges, and we recruited a few more people.

[Charles]

insectdud: Actually Gallery 4.2 was available in beta testing to anyone who had submitted to the Marketplace for over a week

[insectdude]

OK, so it was available to a slightly larger restricted group than I thought... it's still not the same as proper public beta testing is it?

The current state of the Gallery bug tracker should be all the evidence you need to show that the testing process for this particular release was inadequate.

[Rhett]

OK, so it was available to a slightly larger restricted group than I thought... it's still not the same as proper public beta testing is it?

The current state of the Gallery bug tracker should be all the evidence you need to show that the testing process for this particular release was inadequate.

We are very well aware of the issues with gallery, we have all been working very hard on it as well, both to improve the process, and resolve any outstanding issues. We will have an update very soon.

[Megami Community]

The Beta Test is IPS' way of allowing clients to test for new bugs ... I doubt that will change ... it helps IPS identify bugs that they may have missed.

[insectdude]

We are very well aware of the issues with gallery, we have all been working very hard on it as well, both to improve the process, and resolve any outstanding issues. We will have an update very soon.

I'm glad to hear you are trying to improve the process, I look forward to seeing what you come up with.

Nobody expects entirely bug-free releases because (a) that is impossible, and (b) testing can never replicate large-scale real-world deployment. However my experience as a customer over the last 18 months has been that IPS has a poor record when it comes to critical bugs in release versions.

I would also question how effective your version control is. Time and again I see bugs in the tracker that are marked as fixed, but are actually not fixed when the next release comes around, or bugs that were fixed previously but then recur in subsequent versions.

You should also be able to work on and issue bug-fix releases while simultaneously and separately developing new features in another code branch. This is something I have never seen happen at IPS. Once you've decided to work on a new major version, all bug-fixing point releases for the current version cease. That means customers can be faced with many months of waiting for the new features to be ready before outstanding bugs get fixed. I'd be interested to know why you take this approach.