Things have been hopping here in the office (and correspondingly quiet on the blog) for the past couple months while we've been beta testing FogBugz 6. I have found it interesting to see how the beta test process has evolved. 

Early in the beta testing period, our beta customers were finding dozens of bugs, from major ones like not being able to install in certain configurations to minor ones like fixing the placement of buttons in the German version. After our intrepid developers tracked down those bugs and fixed them, we tested the fixes internally and sent out a new beta release with the collected fixes. 

As the beta testing period has continued, the problems being found are getting more obscure. A new feature doesn't have quite the functionality one customer desires. Another customer finds an error that we can't reproduce internally despite our best efforts. 

We still want to fix these problems, but every code change requires more testing to ensure that nothing else has been broken by the change. So throughout the beta process, we have had to become more selective as to what kinds of problems we will fix. At this point in the beta process, we are only fixing bugs that cause FogBugz to crash. There are minor bugs that we have decided to not fix for the FogBugz 6 release, and that decision kills us. We want to send out an absolutely perfect release with no known problems. But if we tried to fix every problem, we'd be changing code and re-testing for many more months, if not years. 

We think that FogBugz 6 is a big step forward for FogBugz with many exciting new features, and we're eager to get it into the hands of customers. So at some point, we have to make the choice that releasing FogBugz 6 is more important than fixing the remaining bugs, even though that means that we will already have dozens of open cases to be fixed in a future 6.1 release. We'll get back to closing those cases one by one after the release. 

Tweet