taken out of context

It started innocently enough. The Notes 8 Beta was released to the public. Immediately people were up in arms and posting dozens of entries to the beta forum with the same topics. John Head took it upon himself to create some rules of engagement. That's when it got a little ugly.

Apparently Volker Weber was offended by John's self-empowered actions and launched a crusade against him. As is common, the statements Volker quoted were taken out of context and were not credited or referenced, making it somewhat difficult to determine who he was talking about. Today I was dragged into the tempest in a teacup when the same was done with some comments I made on Ed Brill's blog. Taken out of context and with no further discussion they seem to say one thing, when in reality the common interpretation is not the correct one.

I have already clarified my intent on both Ed and Nathan's blogs, but I'll repeat it here. First, the context. The conversation on Ed's blog was about things that hold up deployment of new software versions:

[Ed Brill] Raises an interesting question, Pete -- does the traditional software superstition that prevents organizations from deploying a "dot zero" release still apply? My impression is that a .0 could be dead solid perfect, but some companies by policy will still wait for a .0.1.

[Me] It's more testing and training that affect our rollout schedule than any perceived quality issue with .0 releases. As Dave said, by the time we have done our testing and gotten our training materials together the .01 release it out already.

I will say that my testing of Notes 8 beta has gone very, very badly and that experience will greatly affect our adoption of Notes 8, regardless of the point release. I read John Head's rules and am taking them to heart, hence the silence regarding my issues. :)

My take on John's rules is that they were basically asking everyone to do what they could to actually help the testing efforts. Complaining about things you couldn't change wouldn't help. In this case I'm having a problem getting the Notes 8 Basic or Standard clients to run. I don't have the time to do troubleshooting and crash analysis, so I opted not to report my problems. I have nothing substantive to report, therefore there is no reason for me to make a report. I could whine and wail in the beta forum but without any documentation it's rather pointless. John's rules of engagement influenced me, but I think in a positive way.

This is relevant to the discussion with Ed because the problems I have had with the beta will mean I will be doing more extensive and longer-term testing of Notes 8 than I have any previous version. That will significantly delay my Notes 8 deployment.

© 2007 Charles Robinson. All rights reserved.