Hi all,
I've been staying out of this discussion since I don't use the IDV or the
TDS anymore but John's note raises some red flags that I think Unidata and
its governance committees should address.
> The rollout on friday hit a few snags, compounded by me being sick so I
> couldnt respond quickly.
>
Considering what Unidata has gone through in the past with losing key
personnel and the impact that that has had on its products it is
disconcerting that one of its core products is still tied so closely with
an individual developer. I don't fault the developer - John is incredibly
dedicated and works very hard - rather I fault management and its
continuing inability to address these (albeit difficult) issues.
>
> You might think "Why didnt we find these problems before releasing?"
> Because we dont have a separate test team, like commercial software release
> cycle does. We constantly improve our testing, but plenty gets past us. We
> rely on the users to find the last set of bugs. And its all but impossible
> to get users to try beta software. Fact of life.
>
>
This is a cop-out. There are 5 engineers who work on THREDDS (
http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/committees/usercom/2014Apr/agenda.html) and 2
engineers that work on the IDV. The TDS has been in production for over a
decade. These were *not* edge case errors. They were errors in core
functionality and should have never gotten into production.
-Jeff
