From: Andrew Gabb (agabb@tpgi.com.au)
Date: Fri Oct 03 2003 - 01:40:10 EST
From: "Bhavani Palyagar-MU" <bpalyaga@ics.mq.edu.au>:
> I am wondering what kind of relationship exists between "Known
Issues"
> (which are generally stated in Release notes) and RE. Forget
the unstated
> ones for a moment! Few developers (include me here) sometimes
know of some
> problems and pretend to be not knowing them and wait for them to
appear as
> post release defects!
>
> Questions I have are:
>
> 1. Are most "Known Issues" Requirements Defects?
etc.
No, IMO they are rarely requirements defects. If the list is maintained by the developer, he/she often *avoids* including requirements issues, because it shows fundamental limitations in their product. They like to hide these. Often the description is something like 'If you do this, then that happens. Solution: Don't do this. Do this instead.'
Most often the 'known issues' are situations where the app behaves strangely, or specific conditions under which failure occurs, ie they are more problems in the implementation than in the 'requirements'. Of course, we could construct requirements which the app fails to meet, but these would often be pathological in nature or solution-oriented. In many cases, these requirements would be such that you would never think of specifying them in advance, unless you were particularly paranoid.
As an example, consider the following. I use Netscape 7.1 for mail and news, when I can. Netscape 7 and later does not allow you to save multiple mail messages in a single text file, although earlier versions did. This feature is very important to me in the way in which I archive emails giving me both a storage-efficient and searchable archive of emails (I don't archive attachments). Apparently the current developers either did not consider this to be useful feature or left it out and are now denying it is very useful.
This is *not* listed as a 'known issue' with Netscape - you have to search Google Groups carefully to find that it is actually a 'de-feature' of modern Netscape (which is now an open-source project). But many other of the 'funny' things that Netscape 7 does are listed.
BTW, before we get into a religious war, IE/Outlook has just as many (perhaps more) 'funny' things that happen. In a few of my avatars I am a regular user of these apps too.
Afternote: My needs for archiving are important, so I eventually (a week or two ago) decided this was a critical failure of Netscape and decided to change to IE/Outlook 2002, which saves messages in plain text just fine. After a day or so of installation, configuration, conversion and testing, I found that Netscape is *far* preferable if you seriously want to copy your data and configuration between two separate computers, which is an even more important requirement for me (desk and laptop). *This* is not listed as a 'known issue' with IE/Outlook, either.
[If anyone wants to argue this issue, lets do it offline, but before you consdier challenging this, consider the following. I can transfer my full Netscape environment (web, mail, news) from one computer to another with no special tools - I just copy a branch. Outlook 2002 keeps its *data* in one or more .pst files, but keeps other important information (eg signatures, settings) in other directories and the registry. Worse (and this is the killer) Outlook 2002 uses OE6 for News, and OE spreads the News data and information all over the shop. This deficiency in Outlook and OE is well known and various vendors (eg ABF) sell products that copy it all over, but not one of these would guarantee I could copy both Mail and News.]
Andrew - somewhat more cynical than usual at the moment.
-- Andrew Gabb email: agabb@tpgi.com.au Adelaide, South Australia phone: +61 8 8342-1021, fax: +61 8 8269-3280 ----- ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- To send a message to this mailing list send it to re-online@it.uts.edu.au. To unsubscribe from this mailing list, email majordomo@it.uts.edu.au with the message `unsubscribe re-online' in the BODY of the mail.
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