>The Company I work for have found a problem with their release version of the software which cannot be reproduced in the development environment.
>
>They are now proposing to ship out parts if not all of the Development environment for VFP6SP5.
>
>My question is: is this legally acceptable?
>
>Regards
>Simon

Legally? I don't know.

I don't think it's a good idea from a business stand point. I've received code from other "solution providers" where I know it's their development environment. Alot of time there are still debug/suspend & half writen mods that they wheren't done with, just makes them look bad and causes more errors. Do you have a copy of the development environment that the release was made from? If so I would try and recreate the problem there.

I guess it also depends on how you do a release. We have a separate QA environment/department that test everything before we send it out the door and we ALWAYS cut the release from the QA environment. We also keep a copy of every QA and DEV environment releases and a copy of the CD of the release. Incase we need to recreate an issue in a past release. If you just cut your development environment and call it good then maybe you could just do that again for this client.

Also we make sure we can replicate all the issues in the QA environment before we fix anything because if they can recreate the problem then how do you know you fixed it? If you can't recreate it begin with then it might not even fix the problem. Maybe if you get the clients data and what they are doing before hand to make sure the current environment fixes their issues, but I still think you are taking a risk.