Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.

Re: Never demo on a development server

Author:Kurt Granroth
Posted:5/21/1999; 12:55:31 PM
Topic:Never demo on a development server
Msg #:6555 (In response to 6538)
Prev/Next:6554 / 6556

Of course the whole thing was a disaster. With my key feature disabled, no amount of handwaving could save the demo. And the server was miles away. I couldn't even contemplate trying to do a quick workaround.

Ouch! I know where you're coming from, here.

We were just finishing up a project a few months ago and doing the final tweaks. There was one known bug in a particular part of the code that I hadn't got around to fixing but the rest of it worked like a charm.

Well, we had to give a demo to the customer. I was out of town that week so a co-worker who was not as familar with the setup did the demo.. and promptly used that ONE feature that didn't work and the whole thing crashed. He tried it again and it crashed again. And again. He never even TRIED any of the other features.. he just kept crashing it on that one.

So I get back to the office to find that the customer was demanding to know why our product was so unreliable after a year of working on it. It took me days to convince them that that was a fluke from using a development version.

BTW, the fix for that show-stopper bug was all of one line and took me about 5 minutes to spot and fix -- I had neglected to initialize a pointer :-(

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