2007-06-08

My first impressions of the Delphi 2007 Update 1

+ Update went well very smoothly (didn't time it as I used the time for having breakfast!)

+ Disk space required after the full install was more or less the same used previously: a couple MB less in some places a few more in others, but overall was only around 10 MB more.

+ Pressing F1 on a IDE menu will no longer render the IDE unusable

- It still doesn't show the help page for that menu though ("No help available for context")

+ New filters available on the Help Index, including "Language: Delphi"

- Interestingly, integer, array, and several other keywords I tried, don't seem to be part of the "Language: Delphi"! :)

- Pressing F1 over those keywords in the editor (and some others such as uses, private, program and more), will either show the infamous "No help found for context" or will point me to C++ only information;

- An empty help filter option (Dinkumware) was left in the shipped version that should not be there;

- There's still C# and VB.NET help offered for some keywords instead of the proper Delphi version of those keywords (try pressing F1 over "implementation"). I wonder if Codegear wants to sell us on MSFT tools! :)

That's all for the first few minutes. I thought of going through my Quality Central reports and see which ones had been addressed (if any), but seeing so many still in the un-opened state after over 2 months of them being reported kind of made me lost interest in doing that check.
In fact, that's one reason, if not the major one, behind my lost of interest in helping out on QC in the latest months... That and seeing clear, concise and easy to replicate reports being left un-opened for years, kind of makes me think that it's a waste of time QCing at all... Sure, it's all fine and dandy using volunteers to pre-process QC, but leaving so many reports un-opened does not add to the overall quality they (CodeGear) are trying to achieve. I'd guess this is one area where they'll need and want to make some changes...

And now another week is ending and I've yet to make a couple promised posts... :(

I'll try to make at least one of those either today or tommorrow at most, since that one involves a discount coupon on a set of components and the time is ticking on that coupon... Stay tuned.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

To me QC looks pretty dead. Even entries in the Delphi 2007 update 1 fixlist are not marked as fixed. Querying fixed reports for Delphi 2007 will give you a result of 3!

Anonymous said...

We're going to push the update to QC soon, which includes what was fixed for update 1. I agree CodeGear can do a lot better with QC, typically my team and I stay focused during the field test on field test reports, and rely on SysOps and TeamB to promote reproducible QC issues to RAID so we can work on them. No excuse, I'll talk to the team tomorrow. If each of the QA team alone can just review and promote or deal with ONE QC report each workday, we'd be through the backlog in no time. (And I'd bet we'd do more then one once we started...)

In the Help search section, you should be able to filter on Delphi only now, removing entries and showing you only what you care about.

The Dinkumware entry is a true bug - that shouldn't be there, side-effect of including in C++.

As to the other bugs, if you don't mind please QC them, then send me an email (cpattinson at codegear dot com) so I can link internally to RAID. We have them on our radar, but it sounds like making them visible in QC would be a good thing.

Fernando Madruga said...

Glad to read that, Chris, and I sure wish you guys the best of luck as in the end that affects me too! :)

I don't have much free time now, been in the middle of a very busy work schedule and still have another blog post to make today for which I will use up all my free time, but as soon as I can, I'll go give QC another check: it helps finding time to QC when one sees some positive attitude like yours, and I'm sure that in the end not only will your products be better but also more people will be willing to spend time QCing things if they see that their reports no longer stay unprocessed so long, so it will be a win-win situation...