Simple example of low-quality Bioware's approach

[Nimrych]

I'm not naive to think it is easy to create some software without bugs. I'm not even naive to think developers would fix everything. So this is now whining, it is just an example of general low-quality job:

 

The patch before last one introduced problem with Trading Network - you were not able to check full list of items in category without setting "Rarity" to any value other than default "Any". People discovered it in like one hour after release and quickly found workaround - changing that "Rarity" setting.

 

Last patch "fixed" GTN. Actually, it simply legalized that workaround - default setting for "Rarity" was changed from "Any" to "Standard". It didn't make fix out of it, it still remains workaround.

 

Now - when you have product and bugs, you do not try to fix everything. It isn't cost-effective. You fix bugs based on 2 things: ease of debugging/fixing and on how big bug's impact is.

- Example 1: You know that some rock on Tatooine has wrong color. 2 persons reported it out of few hundreds of thousands. You ignore this bug. Most people wouldn't notice and even then it won't do much harm.

- Example 2: Half of your players can't log in because "Play" button is inactive on their launchers. It might not be easy to debug, but it has huge impact, so you ought to fix it.

- Example 3: Some set of gear was improperly named, let's say, "Conzular's Vestments" instead of "Consular's Vestments". You get a lot of reports about this, people aren't happy. Bug isn't severe, but it is easily fixable. So you spend 5 minutes changing name of items in your database.

 

GTN's bug has huge impact. Almost everyone uses GTN even if not that often. And this problem is easily discoverable during testing. And Bioware "fixed" it with workaround that actually requires only 5-10 minutes to implement - changing default value is that easy, so it is hard to understand why it haven't been done initially.

 

But the patch before the last one was still released with such bug. So there are multiple options:

1. There was no testing at all or it was so poor, that bug wasn't discovered - fail.

2. They decided it had too insignificant impact to be bothered with - fail.

3. Bug was discovered, but they decided to release it as it is because they had to release other things and didn't want to stop the process and they somehow were unable to remove bugged part of that patch - fail.

 

Correct solutions were:

1. Release everything else except for the fixes to GTN.

2. Implement such easy workaround "fix" before that release and release patch already with such workaround.

3. Postpone patch release and fix bugs first.

4. Relase with bug, but implement real fix instead of workaround with the next patch. It would've at least explained time required for such fix.

 

If developers fail to fix wide-impact easy-to-fix bugs, it might not be possible for them to fix smaller bugs. Or those harder to debug.

 

This example is pretty simple, but it demonstrates lack of testing/analysis/proper management for this software product. This would result in further quality degradation and system failure unless EA/Bioware changes their approach.

 

And now we have Matrix Cubes. Restoring them is pretty easy. Debugging for reasons behind their disappearance might not be (depends). Problem has wide impact and yet it was overlooked during testing and patch was released with this bug.

Edited May 9, 2012 by Nimrych