--- Duane Douglas <email.lists@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > i've worked on a number of small commercial software projects where > the project managers treated testing as an afterthought. does anyone > know of a persuasive way to convince a project manager that formal > testing is important? Radical Counterpoint: If it's commercial software the first release will be expected to have bugs. In addition since you don't yet know your user base it may be hard to measure which features are important, and which ones may be dropped. Also if it's a first release chances are most people aren't even paying for the damn thing so their expectations are rather low - or the product is underpriced to get a foot in the door - or it's just another "me too" product designed to catch a wave (which may or may not last). Commercial software is a different game than custom software which may be mission critical - it's not like an airplane is going to fall out of the sky or traffic lights will stop working. Keep in mind the famous Microsoft slogan "Quality is Job 2.0". In fact trying to "get it right" may cause the product to be late and screw up marketing. Besides thanks to the web it's traditional for most 1.0 products to be full of bugs and crash the machine (otherwise the product "just isn't cool"). Of course maybe if you wrote a spec before you started writing your code there might be something to test in the first place! Hard to fight that one... Michael ===== M I C H A E L J A M E S P I N T O ------------------------------------------------------------ Where I Work: http://www.vm.com Support My Book Habit: http://www.fanboy.com More About Me: http://www.michaelpinto.com My Favorite Music: http://www.thefall.org Japanese Animation: http://www.anime.com __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Yahoo! - Official partner of 2002 FIFA World Cup http://fifaworldcup.yahoo.com __________________________________________________________________________ To unsubscribe send a blank message with unsubscribe in the subject to webproducers-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx To access our webform (instead of sending e-mail) for popular commands including subscribe, unsubscribe, digest, and vacation visit www.WebProducers.org. You can also access the list archive at the website. Questions and comments are welcome just e-mail me, morry@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx