Inside AOL Explorer

For those of you in the tech industry, you are probably very familiar with the duration of the project where all you do is focus on bugs.  Getting bugs, understanding bugs, and fixing bugs.

That is where we are right now for AOL Explorer 1.5. : /

Before we go out to Beta, our QA Team (bless 'em) seem to find tons of bugs for the Dev team to fix before we can release the software to Beta.  But getting to Beta is the easy part: the bugs really come in once we are in Beta and are heading toward our final releases.

The QA Engineers are going crazy finding precise failcases for the bugs (for example, "the browser sometimes crashes when you close it" is not enough: what are the machine specs, what other software needs to be running, what sites do you need to have open, etc, is all crucial information that takes time for QA to figure out).  On the Dev side, the coders are fixing the bugs faster than the QA team can write them...which is cool.  However, since the bugs still keep coming in, that means the Dev engineers are constantly crossing a finish line, and getting another finish line to cross.

It is kinda like running a race, finishing it, and then hearing, "oh, just go another mile and *then* you will be done."  ::sigh::

We call this phase The Bug-Hell March : )

At any rate, that is where we are now...fixing the bugs that only a few of you have seen (in general, this has been a pretty stable release). 

You report them, we fix them.  And we are almost all done....

And then we hear of "just one more bug"  : )

-Rice

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