November 21, 1991
Dear Everyone:
As I mentioned before, I am currently serving on a
Team. Company is heavily into
“Teams” and "having fun at
work" these days. The purpose of
this particular Team (we have not yet come up with a catch-y name) is to
plan for and later test the new IDI Records Management software program.
Which we haven't got yet.
Which we couldn’t start testing
if we had it because it has to run on “BUSiness” Release L1F.
Which we haven't got yet.
Which we couldn't install if we
had it because the latest word from Ohio is that Users on the East Coast
installed Release L1F and reported lots of bugs.
So we (and a lot of other IDI
customers) are currently in a “please stand by” mode.
Computer software companies put their products out
in "releases”. The first time
they market a product is “Release 1”. When
they make enough changes to Release 1, they put out Release 1.1.
When they have enough changes to
justify rewriting the whole thing, they come out with Release 2.0.
And so on.
This is why, when you look at a particular
software, you'll see something like ”runs on DOS 3.0 or higher”. IDI
(“Information Doodles, Inc.”) chose to letter their releases, rather
than numbering them. So,
“BUSiness” has gone through 12 releases so far.
This is an indication that
“BUSiness” has been around for quite a while, one of the reasons for
choosing it.
So, why do we at Company have to test their new
software for them? Well, first,
caveat emptor (let the buyer beware).
Computers have a tricky way of doing what you
tell them to do instead of
what you want them to do.
(In fact, Company has a whole
“team” of people whose job it is to try and evaluate new software and
equipment all the time. What a
fun way to make a living!)
Actually, computers do what the
programmers tell them to do.
Programmers use strings of
“codes”, instructions to the computer the tell it
exactly what to do, whether it's right or wrong.
Writing all those strings of
codes takes a lot of time. One of
the programmers favorite shortcuts is to copy a string of codes from
some other program that he/sure he she did before.
Or to copy part of a program that
someone else did.
(Sound familiar? That's
what your chromosomes are doing when they reproduce to create new
cells.)
Unfortunately, this means that the programmer could
be copying mistakes from before. When
the computer do something totally unexpected, the programmer calls it “a
bug”.
(Or a genetic tendency toward premature hair loss.)
According to legend, when one of the first, big
computers seemed to be malfunctioning, they opened the cover and found a
dead insect inside. The
programmers gleefully blamed the bug for whatever had gone wrong, and a
tradition was born. When you find
a “mistake”, you are not the victim of a careless programmer.
You’re “debugging the system“.
If the “mistake” is a big one, the programmers fix
it and include the fix in the next release.
Hence all the new releases, such
as Release L, sub-release 1, sub-sub-release F.
If the “mistake” is a little one, they call it a
“feature”. For instance, in
WordPerfect, if you hit PF1, the computer will allow you to “undelete”
the last thing you deleted. You
can't convince me that a programmer put a lot of skull sweat into that
one. Somebody found it by
accident. In fact, one of the
most popular books on how to use WordPerfect, which was
not written by WordPerfect,
is called
Tips, Tricks and Traps.
As for testing IDI’s not-yet-released Records
Management software, we’re going to be testing it because Company was
actively involved in the initial development--and because we’ll get a
price break on the completed product when it comes out.
We still, however, have not come
up with a catchy name for our Team. I
like “Ashley's” suggestion: “Information
Doodles, Inc.”, Overview & Testing Strategies.
I-D-I-O-T-S.
In other news…
“Jeannie” and I finally did get out to the movies
last weekend. We watched
Highlander 2,
which is a sequel to
Highlander. I never got a
chance to see the original, but “Jeannie” did.
Halfway through this one, she
leaned over and whispered: “If
you can believe it, the first one was worse.”
Hard to believe.
But the popcorn was good
I'm on vacation next week.
After that I had a bare three
weeks on the job before the end of the year.
For those who don't know it,
“Marshall”, “Jeannie” and I will be Christmas-ing, in Canby.
Love, as always,
Pete
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