Genii Weblog

I broke a cardinal rule - don't tell Paul

Mon 2 Feb 2009, 08:43 AM



by Ben Langhinrichs
Part of my reason for having this blog is to share the real life experiences of running a small software company.  While there are wonderful advantages to being nimble and not having committees decide everything, there is the disadvantage at times of being your own QA department.  While Quality Assurance is critical, and something I take very seriously in shipping products, I sometimes slip up and forget to properly focus on Quality Assurance in beta versions.

So, on Friday, after a great deal of testing of the first beta of our  iFidelity for Lotus Notes  product, I should have known not to make that one last tweak.  The tweak made stress testing easier, and seemed like a perfectly safe and sensible, though minor, performance enhancement, but due to misplaced parentheses (I know how some sad person at Google feels right now), messages were getting converted to MIME that shouldn't have been, then getting converted back to rich text using the native MIME to CD conversion.  The result was ugly messages, the exact opposite of what was intended.  While it was a reminder that if the Notes inbound conversion were not so bad, this would not have been such a problem, that is cold comfort.  I still broke a cardinal rule to not make changes right before sending out a version, beta or not.

So, mea culpa, mea culpa.  Just don't tell Paul.

Copyright © 2009 Genii Software Ltd.

What has been said:


778.1. Lars Berntrop-Bos (02/02/2009 12:46 PM)

We don't need to. Since big brother Bill will surely pick up this fart...


778.2. Paul Mooney (03/02/2009 03:44)

I have reserved a seat for you in my next session............


778.3. Ben Langhinrichs (02/03/2009 07:59 AM)

Is it feeling a bit warm in here, or is that just me?