Support matters

[Dominick Samperi]

In article <402 at uport.UUCP> plocher at uport.UUCP (John Plocher) writes:
>I'm new here at Microport; meetings are one of the only ways I have of
>"learning the ropes".  
  ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ 
My past experience with Microport leads me to believe that you will be
able to serve your costumers better if you DO NOT "learn the ropes;" just
use your natural sense of fairness...

>	If *some* of you want to help with a "real" beta, send me mail.
                                              ^^^^

Beta testing is hard work, time consuming and tedious, and the least you
should do, short of paying your beta testers, is to provide "real" beta
test feedback. This means, for example, not telling your beta tester that
the "fix" for a compiler bug that he spent many days isolating is to buy
another vendors compiler. Your beta testers also deserve informed feedback
from someone at Microport who knows what he/she is talking about (I can
give many examples where this was not the case). And when you can't fix
a problem, you shouldn't promise your beta testers that you will send
the relevant source code, so he/she can work on it (for free), and then not
follow through.

Software testing and bug fixing is undoubtedly your major technical activity
(as it is for all large software systems), so your beta testers are
essentially doing a large portion of your work for you, for free, and I
think you owe them more respect than you have given them in the past.

>	"Beta" does NOT mean "production" or "placate an upset customer"
>	or "get a free upgrade"; now that I'm here, Beta means BETA, and
						    ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ (what?)

Yes, and beta testing should be a VOLUNTARY activity. 
-- 
Dominick Samperi, NYC
    samperi at acf8.NYU.EDU	samperi at marob.MASA.COM
    cmcl2!phri!marob        	uunet!hombre!samperi
      (^ ell)