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

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. > 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