Re:Are Android customers left to rot the moment we walk out ...
by enjo on Friday December 03, 2010 @12:29PM
(#1966686)
That's definitely the biggest issue. Back in my Symbian days we'd see everything go through essentially 3 testing cycles.
1. Acceptance test at the OEM level
2. Acceptance test for each individual phone
3. Another round of testing at the carrier level.
It's that third round of testing that was always the most frustrating, as it was rarely well executed. We'd get a lot of really ticky-tack things ("bugs" in the form of "I don't think feature X should work this way"), while the big problems were rarely caught. We finally built out a rather large internal QA staff which was much more effective.
I'm not against testing, but the carriers need to adapt to the new environment. Instead of trying to catch every bug (and failing) be much quicker to push updates to the network. I'd much rather have an update every month or two, rather than wait 4 or 5 months to get a fix in.
This is one thing Apple gets right. The cadence of their updates is perfect.
1. Acceptance test at the OEM level 2. Acceptance test for each individual phone 3. Another round of testing at the carrier level.
It's that third round of testing that was always the most frustrating, as it was rarely well executed. We'd get a lot of really ticky-tack things ("bugs" in the form of "I don't think feature X should work this way"), while the big problems were rarely caught. We finally built out a rather large internal QA staff which was much more effective.
I'm not against testing, but the carriers need to adapt to the new environment. Instead of trying to catch every bug (and failing) be much quicker to push updates to the network. I'd much rather have an update every month or two, rather than wait 4 or 5 months to get a fix in.
This is one thing Apple gets right. The cadence of their updates is perfect.