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Phase II installation bugs: Reflections on bugs

'And first day, oh gawd, second day, oh gawd. That was the introduction of version II. ... And it would not be a word of a lie if I said for the next six months, 95% of my time I've spent dealing with the problems arising out of version II. And we actually ought to clearly have tested the system properly and had acceptance testing down here as Jenny rightly said. When I said about this week's delay she accepted which in a way surprised me ... because I know at the time there'd already been two week's delay on it and you wanted it in because it would be faster and sort out some of the problems. ...

Of course it wasn't quite like that and as Jenny rightly said afterwards, it would have been far better to have got it right and delayed a month, two months, three months because we had a system that actually worked even though it had problems. But to go into a system which almost stopped us working altogether and spent six months correcting it, there were so many problems with it that were silly problems. There even is today.

... Meanwhile the systems administration just keeps working, it's true isn't it, come on. [Jenny:] Yes it is. I think the whole thing with version II ??? nothing is going forward up in the North of England. They just seem to be caught up in bugs and everything else don't they really. We don't seem to have made any progress at all. [Keith:] The thing is with version II what they should have done is put in all the fixes, they were completely rewriting it and things that were right before weren't right in this version and [Jenny:] partly because they'd taken it upon themselves, to be fair they were trying to be helpful, but they actually go and declare UDI and do things of their own accord, wouldn't they. Keith would find things that they'd done that they'd not been told to do but they thought it was the right thing to do but they're not the business people. [Keith:] They put restrictions on things because they thought, oh they want that and we didn't want this restriction on. The other thing, where it was the other way. But simple things of, if you like, product quality whereby you click on a thing and until you get the display you should get the egg timer, ... The egg timer doesn't appear, you don't know whether you've clicked properly so you click again and if you're not careful there's one screen where in fact you create a renewal of your policy in that time. It's that sort of detail.'

X071 page 005.03 (tape 02.2.05) Keith Notes/Tape 20/01/95

Social influence:
Technical influence: System characteristics: Reliability & robustness


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Social influence
Technical influence

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