Daynote ,Svenson

MM-lxxvii     Friday

2000-03-17

With the temperature fixed (at 8°C) and the clouds locked in place (but no rain) it should be nice to sit behind a screen.

Jan will be away for a few weeks (of to America and then on holiday) so he has been testing a few days now. Finding a lot of bugs that he should have found months ago. Of course they must be solved instantly.

Our intention was to collect the problems and send out a patch each two or three months. Up to patch-4 we have pretty well kept up that system. Patch-4 however was sent out in January, hurriedly and without testing. The result is that we are now fixing bugs and sending out patches at an uncomfortable rate, we are at 08 now. The fixes must be done in a hurry and as everybody knows testing suffers most from hurying. Of course this starts to cause irritation and doubt in the opcos.
All because someone doesn't like testing.
Of course the lack of documentation and specifications is not helping us a lot. Typically a project that has been running wild and, since Peter passed it on, without anyone in the driving seat.

Normally a comma delimited text file has a comma (or a semicolon) at the end of each field. The data I got from OPRS to fill up the HCC file starts off like that but somewhere the last semicolon is missing. The parsing program thus doesn't find the end of the last field and dies (with an index out of range error). The first records are all as expected so while testing everything looked right. I had to step trough all the correct records with the debugger and even then I only found out after several tries. I was looking for a programming error, never suspecting the data (from production) to be corrupt.

Well I don't need Linux or Win2000 to know we are living in interesting times. I just have to look, at the problem reports on (and spilling off) my desk.

Adios