It's even worse than it appears.
Sunday January 26, 2020; 9:15 AM EST
Testing is needed#
  • Andy Sylvester asked yesterday what can he do to help. Here's one thing that really holds back progress. When I ship a new version of a piece of software, test it. If you don't know how to do software testing, learn. This is a real problem.#
  • I'm going to release a new version of LO2 soon, maybe today or tomorrow. I will have verified it works on my machine, for what I use it for. But there may be deal stoppers for others.#
  • These days, even experienced developers write ridiculous bug reports. One guy sent me an email saying he couldn't unsub from the nightly email. No clue as to what he did, or what happened. He just said it didn't work and asked if I knew what the problem was. There's nothing I can do for him.#
  • 20-plus years ago we had a community that tested the new stuff, and gave us good bug reports. Then we could get some work done. One of them, Terry Teague, was a one-man QA department. He worked for Apple doing testing, but volunteered for community projects like ours, in his spare time, out of the goodness of his heart.#
  • When I release the new version of LO2, I will write up the changes, here, on the blog, and provide a thread on GitHub for problem reports. I will be listening. #
  • See also: Professional users.#

© 1994-2020 Dave Winer.

Last update: Sunday January 26, 2020; 9:27 AM EST.

You know those obnoxious sites that pop up dialogs when they think you're about to leave, asking you to subscribe to their email newsletter? Well that won't do for Scripting News readers who are a discerning lot, very loyal, but that wouldn't last long if I did rude stuff like that. So here I am at the bottom of the page quietly encouraging you to sign up for the nightly email. It's got everything from the previous day on Scripting, plus the contents of the linkblog and who knows what else we'll get in there. People really love it. I wish I had done it sooner. And every email has an unsub link so if you want to get out, you can, easily -- no questions asked, and no follow-ups. Go ahead and do it, you won't be sorry! :-)