Well Craig, nothing personal but since you are the one everyone is taking shots at i'll put my 2 cents here. I have been working with fox since it was titled FoxBase. I've been through the wringer with all of the releases since MS bought it and the years of MS rumors. I keep buying and it keeps earning me a living. I don't think that my issue with MS is necessarily Fox specific. Rather I have a problem with any company that sells me a product advertised or documented to perform a specific task in a specific fashion and then fails to correct _any_ problems that occur with their product claims. This to me smacks of dishonesty. I feel that it is arrogant of MS to contend that if I want a product that I have already purchased to work as advertised I have to be ready to by a new version to fix the one that I already have.

Again, nothing personal here but I feel that MS has grown accustomed to taking advantage of the developer community and this is just a sign of their corporate culture.




>In the book "Testing Computer Software", which is considered one of the definitive books on software testing, the authors point out that a 20 line program with a loop and simple IF statements can have 100 trillion paths. How could that possibly be completely tested? How could a complex application such as VFP be completely tested?
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>>Your last sentence is a true non-sequitur! That there was a high number of people tesing VFP has absolutely NOTHING (repeat: NOTHING) to do with either the difficulty of testing or catching everything before release.
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>>If the testing is 'difficult' then steps should be taken to reduce the difficulty AND/OR more test time should be allowed to accommodate the difficulties AND/OR the calibre of the testers ought to be confirmed AND/OR more people should be seconded to the testing effort.
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>>Everything has a much higher chance of being caught if (non-comprehensive list):
>>1) Setting an objective to test 100% of the code and earnestly working toward it even in the knowledge that 'it is impossible' (because it surely WILL be impossible if one starts out with that premise!).
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>>2) Taking product-knowledgeable people and tasking them with identifying all of the permutations and combinations of conditions that can arise in the product.
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>>3) Taking those same people, and possibly other of less product knowledge, to devise a thorough and comprehensive test plan for each condition identified.
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>>4) Tasking people, under detailed control, to execute each and every test plan and to report all outcomes.
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>>5) Addressing each and every test outcome that does not conform to spec.
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>>6) Evaluating the proposed "fix" for poor outcome(s) and ensuring that ANY of the prior test plans that are implicated are tasked to be run again regardless of their previous outcome(s).
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>>7) Repeating steps 4 - 6 until the list is exhausted or management decrees termination of efforts.
>> - ALL uncompleted tests at that point must still be completed some time in the NEAR FUTURE regardless of the product being in delivery status.
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>>You can have thousands of people working on testing a product, but if their efforts are uncoordinated/unplanned and if positive outcomes are not tracked along with negative outcomes then all you have achieved is to have occupied lots of people's time. In terms of quality of the test effort you have NO IDEA if testing was done to 7% or 37% or 87% and that serves no one! Yes, it can be stated that product xxx was the most severely tested product ever, but the truth will be that "severely" is defined as the most manpower expended and nothing else. It certainly saya ZERO about the QUALITY of the testing.
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>>SNIP