Do the guys at wordpress.com really test their new implementations before rolling them out to production? It seems they don’t.
Sure, nothing is perfect and (us) developers are human too, thus, we may break something unintentionally… However, to minimize this kind of mishaps, it’s of good practice to test thoroughly. Make sure new implementations won’t break something else, etc.
In college, my C++ teacher taught us to make our apps as robust as possible. This means that we need to try to cover any possible ‘thing’ the user might do and us, as developers, might break. How? try breaking the application.
This is not the first time something like this happens at wordpress.com.
Do the wp guys care about this stuff? I mean, why can’t they make sure that things like this won’t happen again? Is it because wp.com is a ‘free’ service they might think something like “if they don’t like it, they can go elsewhere”? I don’t know what the reason is, but IMO, they should test, test, test and test their applications as much as possible before rolling them out to production.
Less bugs, more happy campers.
10 Comments
Maybe my memory is short, but looking back at all the b0rked .com upgrades over the past six or eight months, this one has got to be near the top of the most b0rked list. And the sad thing is that many of the bugs that showed up with the last [sic] upgrade haven’t been fixed yet.
And where is Matt and Co? Wandering around Biosphere.
I’m telling you, just because you’re giving a service for free it doesn’t mean that such service has to be somehow sloppy.
Maybe it’s just me, but when I do something for free, I try to be as professional as possible giving the best quality of work just as if I was getting paid for it. But then again, that’s me.
This kind of borked upgrades discourage people from using the service, they drive the users away to look for a less buggy alternative. Maybe they don’t care that much since they have thousands of users… who cares if a few leave? See what I mean?
The more the user base you have, the robustest your product should be. They have the experience to make this happen… but obviously they’re not doing it, or better said, don’t care to do it.
It seems as though they don’t want to learn from previous mistakes and avoid similar things to happen again.
Oh well… *shrugs*
It was borked in so many different directions, too. It was 360-borked. AND it seemed all the senior staff were off the grid. Not exactly the best way to do things.
Of course is not. But since there are more people signing up for new accounts than leaving, they won’t care.
They will only (maybe) care if the trend reverses, and given what is available, there will likely be more coming in than leaving for quite some time.
And you have to love the sweet and sour irony: give everyone a space upgrade and all you have to do to get it is put up with bugs.
Seems fair doesn’t it?
We have witnessed huge security holes as well as the “breakage” everywhere. I take your point Juan. There are so many new bloggers signing up every day that TPTB could care less who they lose.
No, not only is not fair but unprofessional too.
If Habari offered something like wp.com, and current members would start to migrate away, then some things would change, definitely.
Meh…
Do a search for ‘friday’ in those forums. There are quite a number of threads that basically said “It’s Friday. What will staff break today?” over there.
You know? probably this has been said before, but maybe all the free blogs at wp.com are the sandbox where the wp guys test their new bugs, I mean, features before rolling them out to the real production servers: The VIP ones. I bet the VIP blogs don’t get this kinda crap.
If this is the case, these guys are really smart, they get thousands of beta testers plus they get some money by placing google ads on their blogs and by offering upgrades.
It seems the wp guys had it made, huh?
And what about the members? they either deal with this crap or move out. But the wp guys may think: “they won’t move out because they rather deal with this kinda bugs than paying a hosting provider, unzip files, deleting files on server, uploading new files… create backups… etc.”
It’s proven that they simply don’t care; they roll out whatever they want and see if it goes well or not. That’s why they have thousands of beta testers who’ll let them know if something works or not.
This is exactly what I said on the forum ages ago -> we free hosted bloggers are the beta testing community. It was not well received.
One Trackback
[...] Give the rash of problems seen in the past when upgrades are loosed on the general blogging public, one has to wonder about the thoroughness of WordPress pre-release testing. So, I’ll end this with cautious optimism since I am writing this on a Mac in Safari 3 [...]