Chris Pattinson

To hijack a post from the borland.public.bdn.qualitycentral newsgroup, it’s a good idea to first introduce myself:

My name is Chris Pattinson, and I’ve taken over as the Quality Assurance manager for Borland Developer Studio. I’ve been with Borland for about 6 years, from International QA engineer, to International QA Lead, to International QA Manager, to International Project Manager and now QA Manager. I’ve watched the quality of the product peak at Delphi 5, dive to Delphi 8 and now climb itself up - we’re not done yet.

Seriously though, this is a good team and I hope to help focus their efforts on improving the product so the most serious issues that the community faces are fixed first, and done right the first time. We have a lot of advantages - our development community, Quality Central and BDN to name a few. We’re also conducting more surveys and customer centric information gathering exercises. Not that we only want to show we care, but actually do the right thing. Stability, performance and documentation - all top on the list. Who doesn’t want a reliable, fast and well documented development tool? Hopefully we all see in the ‘New DevCo’ that we act quickly and efficiently on your feedback.

For example, quality and stability were goals for BDS2006. Late in the original development schedule we found that we weren’t where we wanted to be, and instead of forcing ourselves to ship to the original date - we changed the date realistically to meet the project goals. C++ even then was a bit shake, so the team focused for a couple months on nailing the top issues in C++ up until late 2005, and then we continued into 2006 with a major update and a number of hotfixes. Personally, I always love win/win situations which both benefit the customer, and let the team know they are doing the right thing.

Some other things are in progress. A couple I need to keep a surprise, but I’ll hint that one has to do with the upcoming field test. Internally we’re very focused on cleaning up the internal bug tracking database so that a ‘Must Fix’ bug clearly needs to be fixed for the next release, and that if we’re not going to fix a defect that was reported in QC by our community - we’re realistic about it. Both QA and R&D teams are working very hard to improve our automated testing framework, so that we can detect and fix defects a lot more effectively. Maybe I’ll be able to show off some of that in the near future.

Also, we’re changing our development methods to ensure R&D and QA work more closely during the project cycle. I’ll talk more about that in a while. Agile and Scrum is really interesting, we’ve been at it for a few months and already seeing good things come of it.

So, a big *wave* to all you folks in the development community, I’m sure to be seeing you around!

Chris

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This entry was posted on Friday, July 7th, 2006 at 4:58 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.