Testing reports

[John Layman]

Regardless of the fact that GnuCash is built on the backs of voluntary
effort, it serves a customer.   And the Cost of Quality where GnuCash is
concerned is no different than with a commercial product.  Whether or not
GnuCash is purchased for a price, the customer does incur cost in using it,
and what are termed (in CoQ lingo) External Failure Costs are largely borne
by the customer.  Just as with commercial products, the cost of GnuCash can
rise beyond what the customer is willing to pay.

-----Original Message-----
From: gnucash-user-bounces+john.layman=laymanandlayman.com at gnucash.org
[mailto:gnucash-user-bounces+john.layman=laymanandlayman.com at gnucash.org] On
Behalf Of John Ralls
Sent: Thursday, April 12, 2012 12:18 PM
To: gnucash at double-bars.net
Cc: warlord at MIT.EDU; gnucash-user at gnucash.org
Subject: Re: Testing reports


On Apr 12, 2012, at 7:57 AM, Colin Scott wrote:

> 
>> ... Tests which fail for insignificant reasons (like case in an SGML 
>> tag) waste developer time and are worse than useless.
> 
> Changes made in external libraries are just as capable of screwing up your
results as changes made anywhere else, and you need to know what changes
have occurred, even where those changes are harmless - and if they are they
need to be incorporated into your standard.  

Rubbish again. Well, maybe it's true if you're writing embedded controls for
critical equipment (say, fly-by-wire for an airplane). In any other case,
though, that level of change awareness is too expensive. In commercial work,
it would drive the cost of the product beyond what customers would pay; in
volunteer work (like Gnucash) it would mean that those tests are ignored --
or the comparison document gets robotically changed to match the new output.

Regards,
John Ralls


_______________________________________________
gnucash-user mailing list
gnucash-user at gnucash.org
https://lists.gnucash.org/mailman/listinfo/gnucash-user
-----
Please remember to CC this list on all your replies.
You can do this by using Reply-To-List or Reply-All.