Chris Pattinson

I’ve been quiet on my blog for about a year, that was a result of work to transition the team from Borland to CodeGear then CodeGear to Embarcadero, work on improving our beta tests, and championing product quality. I kept telling myself I should be blogging more, which I’m sure is also true

The team did several ‘cool things’ for quality this year. We went through the ENTIRE bug backlog, reprioritized and retested literally thousands of reports, and identified the highest severity reports we wanted to fix for the Delphi 2009 and C++Builder 2009 release.

Then the team settled in to a focused period of feature development and bug fixing, and the biggest feature work revolved around the latest Unicode feature, Generics, the new Ribbon Controls and DataSnap.  There were a few dozen other features put into the mix as well and we struck a generally good balance of features and fixing.

What really helped the quality this release was full management support. Of course revenue is a pressure, but our new management team as a longer term outlook - they wanted a release for more then just a quarter. So when our field test responses were not looking as good as Rad Studio 2007, we extended the schedule for several more weeks of focused bug fixing - and I think the results paid off.

 Can we do more? Heck yes. And we’ll work on regular updates to both product and documentation, and keep an eye on what you folks are using most and the most serious issues to fix first.

We’re also totally revamping our beta test,  I’ll blog more about that in a week or two since we’ll have our next Delphi .NET product to give this new system (CenterCode Connect) a spin.

Back on topic - I’ve posted fix lists of older Quality Central issues fixed as part of ‘Tiburon’ - the Delphi 2009 and C++ Builder 2009 project.  You can find these articles here:

Delphi 2009 - http://dn.codegear.com/article/38714

C++ Builder 2009 -  http://dn.codegear.com/article/38715

Over 4000 fixes were made, though of course some of those were regressions introduced during development, but it’s still a darn solid number. And the bug find rate was much lower in the final weeks - the usual sign during software development testing is completed and you are ready to ship. We had a good understanding of what we were shipping this time, and already a list of more bugs to fix to take ‘great’ to ‘Wow! Amazing!’.

I’m going to be honest - Documentation isn’t up a level of great quality yet. Delphi 7 help was awesome, and really set a good bar. We’re building back from some business decisions in the past that really cut the quality out from the Documentation since D8, and it’s been a hard climb.

That being said, Documentation/Help *is* definitely better then RAD Studio 2007 with over two hundred fixes between Delphi and C++, especially in terms of speed and number of examples, yet not the great reference experience we want it to be. The team will keep working away on regular updates, and are looking to increase the number of staff to be able to do more in less time.  The R&D team, Nick, Alisdair and even QA such as David Dean have been stepping in to provide webinars and videos to help and I highly suggest a browse of development network in the product communities to see what I’m talking about.

For RadStudio we revamped our test automation tools, and we really leveraged those this year - about 20 000 test cases run against every build, with nice graphical reporting broken down by functional area let us ensure we constantly moved forward with product quality. Now we plan to extend those tests to run against our localized product to ensure our international customers get high quality releases with proper functionality. The international QA teams work really hard and do a good job - but it’s hard to cover that much of a product in manual testing every day!

 Overall, quality in the product is easier to track, and test coverage is increasing. I highly recommend tools from Automated QA for profiling and determing testing code coverage. I’m sure Mark Edington would agree that AQTime was directly responsible for identifying some really nasty performance issues and crash issues in the IDE, leading to D2009 being far more stable then previous releases. 

Hope you enjoy the results of this years work, and feel free to send me an email directly at cpattinson@codegear.com if you run into any bug that you think is bad and we should be looking at ASAP. Of course, I’d appreciate a Quality Central report and good steps

 Regards,

Chris

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This entry was posted on Friday, September 19th, 2008 at 1:11 pm and is filed under General, Quality Central, RADStudio. 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.