Re: Slightly OT - Wheel Scrolling Crashes VS2008 - Very Irritating!

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Jon Forrest wrote:
Jeroen Mostert wrote:

I'm not saying that your problem is trivial or ignorable, mind you -- just that it's completely conceivable that it got past QA, and that it doesn't actually say anything about the Q of QA. There will always be stupid bugs that just plain manage to slip under the radar, no matter how many betas and CTPs and in-house tests you throw at things. Look at the bright side: it's highly unlikely that any future version of VS will have a similar bug. :-)

If it weren't for the fact that wheel scrolling has worked
perfectly for every release of Visual Studio I know of up
to now, I'd be more sympathetic. Regressions are a different
class of bug than problems with new features.

Developers and QA were likely were never aware of potential problems with different scroll wheel settings. You'd have a point if they had explicitly tested and supported the different wheel settings for every release, and had somehow neglected to do this for VS 2008. That's possible, but not very likely. The feature was probably never expanded beyond "wheel scrolling", and "screen at a time scrolling" never treated as a subfeature subject to regression (which is reasonable, since it's actually hard to imagine what disaster has befallen the new code that it can't handle it). A regression as far as the user is concerned, but a hard to catch new bug for the developers, and a missing scenario for QA.

To look at it another way, if screen-at-a-time scrolling had *never* worked properly in any release so far, I sincerely doubt you'd be "more sympathetic" -- you'd probably rail against it still not supporting something this basic for so long, and you'd have a good point at that. Now that it's broken, though, the VS developers and QA will be aware that it is a breakable feature and not something that just happens to work all the time, if they weren't aware before.

Obvious? Yes. Annoying? Yes. Stupid bug? Undoubtedly. A demonstration of laughably bad QA? I don't think so. It's impossible to tell in any case without hard data, and my argument is that the failure to catch this bug, while glaring to those affected by it, is in itself too marginal to base conclusions on.

--
J.
.

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