At 07:34 PM 4/28/99 -0400, you wrote:
At 04:27 PM 4/28/1999 -0400, Dean Robb wrote:
Would it be productive at all to point out that NSI did, in fact, deploy buggy WhoIs software without testing in the first place.
Possibly if it were true it would be productive. It hasn't been confirmed that they didn't test, and I doubt they wouldn't test. But someone already pointed out that testing can reveal only the existance of a bug, not the non-existance. All we can say from our perspective is that the testing missed this bug, which is unfortunate.
As a pretty-experienced beta tester myself, I can say with some authority that it'd be pretty hard to miss the fact that over half the data provided in a WhoIs lookup is missing during any testing procudure worthy of the name. IF it was tested, everyone involved should be in the unemployment line because they are too incompetent for words. This isn't some obscure incompatibility, this is the damn software not doing a significant portion of it's job! It's like a 3D game that can't use Direct3D, or a database program that can't read the database (hey, isn't that what's happening!?!). To use your argument: "testing can only reveal the existance of a bug...". So why didn't testing reveal the existance of this major a bug? "Let there be light!"...and God invented Thomas Edison. Dean Robb Owner, PC-EASY (757) 495-EASY [3279] On-site computer repair, upgrades and consultations Lead SimOps columnist/reviewer on http://WWW.TheGamers.Net