Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!looking!brad From: brad@looking.UUCP (Brad Templeton) Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc Subject: Re: Problem with MKS Toolkit 2.3 on DOS 2.X (and solution) Keywords: mks Message-ID: <1963@looking.UUCP> Date: 21 Aug 88 17:55:44 GMT References: <798@helios.ee.lbl.gov> Reply-To: brad@looking.UUCP (Brad Templeton) Organization: Looking Glass Software Ltd. Lines: 38 In general I have a lot of sympathy with this sort of thing. These days there are so many hardware and software configurations out there, that it is effectively impossible to test everything in every situation. A company like Lotus has to spend millions and millions on it just to do a halfway decent job. In the case of the MKS toolkit, I think it's one of the worst cases imaginable. Operating system dependent stuff is messy. They would have to test it not just on every version of PC-DOS, (there are now 7 from 2.0 to 4.0) on variety of machines, but also the various MS-DOS versions, and systems like VP/ix, DOS/Merge etc. On top of that there are all the networking systems like Novell. That's for file manipulation software. If you start getting direct hardware manipulation, you have to start multiplying this through hardware configurations. PC, AT, 386, clone, PS/2. With and without 8087, 80287 and 80387. With all the different video cards. Do you realize how much it costs just to OWN the hardware to do proper testing? And then, once the testing gets this complex, you have to worry about the fact that there will be mistakes in the testing. For a small to medium sized software house, the general practice is to do extensive testing on common modern equipment, such as an AT or 386 with DOS 3.3, and then to do basic testing on the variants. It's all that you can truly afford. You have to spend some time coding! And even after all this, you still get what is known as the last minute bug. Something you put in when doing a bug fix on something found during the test phase. As much as you *should* only the very rich can afford to restart all testing from then. When you make last minute fixes, you do them with care, but.. (Now I have no knowledge of the nature of MKS's problem, this is just speculation. And while the guys at MKS are friends of mine, this is really just a description of a software developer's experience.) -- Brad Templeton, Looking Glass Software Ltd. -- Waterloo, Ontario 519/884-7473