Re: Quality control - was Re: lmatter[1,6] = '011191' does not work, but ...

June Tong wrote: > > Peter Lancashire wrote: > > > Jonathan Leffler wrote: > > > > Get a bug entered if there isn't one > > > already for it. If you get it entered, it gets a much higher priority than > > > if I get it entered. > > > > This seems an odd way to maintain product quality to me. To mangle > > Shakespeare: a bug is a bug is a bug, whoever finds it first. Do the > > quality control folk at Informix do an impact analysis when deciding > > which bugs to fix first? Or do they react to the customer who shouts > > loudest? That's a good way to lose small customers. > > Bugs are prioritized for fixing based on "Priority" & "Severity" (and some other > things). Priority means how important it was to the customer. Severity means > how nasty the consequences are. Core dumps and wrong results are severity 1. > But a "cosmetic" bug, which would be severity 3, could be very serious to a > customer if it caused the user to hit the wrong key, for instance, hence the > addition of customer-assigned importance. I've seen misplaced messages treated > as "down system"-level bugs. I think you'll appreciate that if an Informix > employee finds a misplaced error message, it isn't as important as if a > customer's system fails because a user misinterpreted a message and killed a job. > Yet, without the "priority" weighting, they would be treated the same. If > Jonathan reported the bug, it would have no priority at all (but it would still > have a severity). Incidentally, it has nothing to do with the size of the > customer. Yes, that makes sense to me. I hope fix_urgency != severity * priority. > > > I am particularly interested in this as I have a bug outstanding for > > over 6 months. All I get is swaps for a different (and worse but at > > least clearly visible) bug. So, any indication that the systems are in > > place to fix this are welcome. The above comment is not reassuring. > > I think what you're talking about here is bad bug-fixing, where they introduce > new problems when they try to fix your bug. I'm not saying bad bug-fixing is > okay, but it's not the same as not fixing your bug. > > June > -- > june_t@hotmail.com > Grounded in Palo Alto, living on Chips Ahoy! cookies -- Peter Lancashire Information Systems Specialist, Bayer plc Eastern Way, Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk, IP32 7AH, UK Tel: +44-1635-562258, Fax: +44-1635-562281 --- If all else fails, read the instructions and the release notes. Join Infuse, the UK Informix User Group at http://www.infuse.org.uk/ ---