Test, Test and Test Again

snikkersnak writes "Richard Collins has written a piece about developers and testers; the article is arguing that in closed development these two roles have to be chained together one-on-one in order to reproduce the 'release early and often' effect of open source development."

Comments

Uh, from my experience...

[Blakey Rat]

From my experience, open source software may be released early and often, but it sure isn't tested thoroughly. Sometimes it seems to me that it's not tested at all, when extremely blatant bugs appear in releases. (One of the recent ones I found is a Import dialog in Inkscape that doesn't alphabetize correctly. This isn't 1985, open source developers, alphabetization of a list of files is a solved problem!)

Of course, I also don't think "release early and often" is a good philosophy. If you release early, by definition you're releasing something that isn't yet ready for the public, and when the public uses it they're going to be disappointed and a lot less likely to try your next version.