[Dtb-talk] Changes to BARD

[Dan Rossi]

I work in the IT industry.  We always do development on identical hardware 
and software as our production systems.  In many cases we even have a test 
system in conjunction with a development and production system.

Having said that, we have certainly had issues where after months of 
testing, we go live only to find that our estimates for user actions fell 
short of reality and unexpected performance issues appear with wildly 
unpredictable results.

Also, when we do testing, we have a team of a dozen or so people trying to 
create every possible scenario that a user might encounter.  When we go 
live, we have on the order of 10,000 users creating all kinds of scenarios 
that we never could have expected.

I work on Oracle, one of the top 5 largest I T companies in the world. 
Somehow, they manage to release software with bugs and it is partly my job 
to patch those bugs on a regular basis.

I know it is frustrating to end users who believe that everything should 
just work the first time, and believe that the programmers are a bunch of 
idiots for releasing software that they obviously didn't even test.  But 
that is not the reality of the situation.  I am certain that NLS engineers 
did a lot of testing on this software before releasing it, and they are 
probably franticly trying to figure out just what unexpected bug they hit 
when they went live.

  -- 
Blue skies.
Dan Rossi
Senior Oracle Database Administrator
Carnegie Mellon University.
E-Mail:	dr25 at andrew.cmu.edu
Tel:	(412) 268-9081