Do you hate sites that don't test before launch?

patwa_2

Me too. I've come across two major sites in the last couple of days that had errors. Worse, the errors were on major parts of the sites, the first one had the fault on the contact form, the second was a forum with an error in the submission form.

Now normally coding errors don't just develop by themselves, unless of course externally hosted libraries are being used which was not the case in the above situations.

I did a year of Software Development last year and at every iteration of the development phase, it was test, test, test that was being drummed into our heads. And as said above, the fault just doesn't develop overnight. If these people had bothered to test the form beforehand the fault could have been found and fixed. It really doesn't give a company a good impression when you try to contact them and get an error. Especially in the scam climate we live in nowadays.

Now to give the second site credit, the form was still being submitted but the error gave the impression this wasn't the case, leading to lots of people duplicate posting and no doubt a headache for the mods

Mad!

anitamarie

Couldn't agree more. The real issue is dev cycles overrun and then senior management say "It has to be shipped today, we'll find the bugs later" and thus it is shipped with no testing.

PaulK_3

Or the management refuses to pay for the testing phase which means that it cannot be tested for any significant amount of time before they demand you work on something else.

esuhl

Think about it - do you pay 10 developers to search for bugs... or sell your product early, pocket the extra money, and have 100,000 users "testing" your product for free...?

In many cases the damage to your reputation would be vastly outweighed by the wheelbarrow-fulls of extra money you'd be raking in. Sad, but true. It's why many companies avoid software until "Service Pack 1" has been released - i.e. the early-adopters have done the testing and the most obvious bugs have been fixed.

The latest irritation I found was on the Post Office website when applying for a credit card "Sorry this site doesn't work with Firfox"! And we were "sold" the web on the basis of platform-independence. Grrr!!!

patwa_2

Too true. I've even been right there when the following conversation took place:

Boss: Is it ready?
Dev: Yes, but X, Y and Z doesn't work.
Boss: Well does A, B and C?
Dev: Yes, but they depend on X, Y and Z
Boss: So it works then
Dev: Yes but...
Boss: Great. Send it for release.
Dev: But it's not complete
Boss: No matter, it works and that's all that's needed. Now for your next project.

The consumers end up getting the raw end of the deal. Take Adobe for example. A while back they released Adobe Acrobat 8. Onlyone minor problem. It wouldn't activate over the web, either for real or fake, because the activation process was faulty. Adobe's response? Oh well we don't know what's wrong, we basically can't be bothered to fix it as we're working on v9 now. It should be out n 6 months. There was a riot about this on the Adobe forums, I tell you!

Crazy!

H.

wolfman

Totally agree. If there are any major or show stopping bugs it shouldn't be put live. Same goes for any iterations, or they should at least be adjusted.

Many sites need to start implementing proven methodologies such as Agile (Scrum, TDD, XP) to stop such things.

millwalll

I agree I went to buy something from Chelsea before and there site was so open asking for cards details on normally http page.