Big bug smackdown! - check your In Box

[FourthWorld]

Thanks to everyone who pitched in with the testing of v6.6.2RC3 over the weekend. 10 new bug reports were submitted, and the dev team is looking into those this morning.

Looking at the bigger picture of RunRev's Big Bug Smackdown:

Over the years many of us have submitted bug reports, and although recently-submitted reports have usually been acted on very quickly, there are many older bug reports still in the system.

One of the challenges with older reports is that so much has happened with the engine since they were submitted, esp. in recent versions, that many of these issues have been addressed in the course of making other changes to the engine. Each of these needs to be re-tested to see if the problem still exists in newer versions.

Looking at the scope of this challenge, LiveCode Product Manager Ben Beaumont came up with a remarkably convenient solution:

If you've submitted any bug reports to the LiveCode bug database, by now you should have received an email from RunRev listing all those that are outstanding, with a convenient link to open it in your browser.

Right now their focus is on bugs rather than enhancement requests, so your email should include only bugs for now - once those are addressed the team will be in a good position to triage enhancement requests later.

Please take some time over the next week or two to test each of those outstanding bug reports in the email sent to you against either the most recent shipping version, 6.6.1, or the next release, 6.6.2 RC3.

Those of you who've already begun on this have made a noticeable difference: of the 450 outstanding bugs prior to the mailing, that number has now been reduced to 327, with more than 60 bug reports having been closed by members of the community.

I recognize that testing can be time-consuming, and we all have other work to attend to as well. In fact, I've only re-tested a handful of the reports in my own list, though I plan to finish them by the end of this week.

Each of us uses LiveCode in different ways, some of us needing database support, others multimedia, etc., and with a language as rich and flexible as LiveCode this sort of effort from each of us is needed to ensure the work we do with LiveCode is solidly supported.

Challenging as it is for all of us, thorough QA initiatives like this will help us all have a LiveCode we can rely on for the work we do, and be proud to share with our friends and co-workers.

For anyone who didn't get the original email Ben sent out, next week he'll be sending out a second email noting the subset of your bug reports still outstanding in the system.

Thanks to all those who've been re-checking their reports, and those who will doing that over the next two weeks.