RE: Fighting a losing battle

["Dan Hall" <dhall -at- san-carlos -dot- rms -dot- slb -dot- com>]

There's been some good advice given so far. Mutual respect 
and working on the big problems are, IMO, key.

You have to remember that as a general rule, from the 
programmer's POV, the functionality is much more important than 
the presentation. After all, if they can get the code to do what
it's supposed to (the hard part), they can always fix typos, colors
fonts and other consistency issues, later (the easy part). Think 
about Visual Basic - anyone can draw an application with buttons, 
gizmos, and a cool GUI. My 6-year-old nephew could use the VB forms 
tool to make a "program." It's making the form _do_ something that 
requires programming skills.

That said, you may want to keep an eye on this. If they're unable/
unwilling to correct errors of consistency, spelling, etc., it's
unlikely that the product will survive. Only you can tell if this
is an issue of time/priorities, or if the company really has a
poor attitude about QA across the board.

When I'm looking for a program (even freeware, or a Java app) to
accomplish something, I'm wary of products with typos. It shows
an _extremely_ low level of QA, and (again IMO) makes me wonder
if the product actually does more complex tasks correctly. If 
the programmer/QA people couldn't spell "caculate" right, it
leaves me questioning the output of complex mathematical 
formulas.

BTW, this isn't meant to start the "spelling errors" thread
again. Really!

Dan

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Planning to attend IPCC 01, October 24-27 in Santa Fe?  Sign up by
October 3 and get a substantial discount!  Program information, 
online registration, and more on http://ieeepcs.org/2001/

+++  Miramo -- Database/XML publishing automation.  See us at  +++
  +++  Seybold SFO, Sept. 25-27, in the Adobe Partners Pavilion  +++
  +++ More info: http://www.axialinfo.com  http://www.miramo.com +++

---
You are currently subscribed to techwr-l as: archive -at- raycomm -dot- com
To unsubscribe send a blank email to leave-techwr-l-obscured -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com
Send administrative questions to ejray -at- raycomm -dot- com -dot-  Visit 
http://www.raycomm.com/techwhirl/ for more resources and info.