Another Day - Another BUG!

[auztin100]

Today I have discovered anothter bug with V9. and this time it serious!


Retrieved our orders as normal this morning, and checked the mail, a customer had placed an order, but realised he had only selected 1 as the quantity, when 2 were required. So I went into the order and and clicked increase quantity.

"Actinic has encountered a problem, and has closed, you will need to restart it ......."

Fair enough, I can cope with that, but now every time I go to this particular order, and double click I just get the same message !!

I can't beleive the amount of bugs, and crashes that are occuring on V9, was there any testing at all on this before it was released.

Seriously thinking of going back to V7, and getting a refund !!

So I'll get the usual answer of "send a support request", but I don't have 3 days to wait process this customers order !

And I haven't paid the £1000 a year for actinic cover, so therefore I feel I need to pay it to cover software that is full of bugs!

[grantglendinnin]

Today I have discovered anothter bug with V9. and this time it serious!


Retrieved our orders as normal this morning, and checked the mail, a customer had placed an order, but realised he had only selected 1 as the quantity, when 2 were required. So I went into the order and and clicked increase quantity.

"Actinic has encountered a problem, and has closed, you will need to restart it ......."

Fair enough, I can cope with that, but now every time I go to this particular order, and double click I just get the same message !!

I can't beleive the amount of bugs, and crashes that are occuring on V9, was there any testing at all on this before it was released.

Seriously thinking of going back to V7, and getting a refund !!

So I'll get the usual answer of "send a support request", but I don't have 3 days to wait process this customers order !

And I haven't paid the £1000 a year for actinic cover, so therefore I feel I need to pay it to cover software that is full of bugs!

Hi Austin

Yes, the latest release v9 release has been tested in both closed beta and a public beta test - however, it is near impossible to test every single scenario with limited data (ie. snapshots) where many situations can cause many variations in the Actinic database.

I agree, v9 - compared to v7 - has a massive drop in quality. v8 was initially the same but eventually started to get near what we would like as the initial release quality.

In addressing the problem, have you compacted and purged the 'Orders'?

£1000 a year for cover? Are you running Enterprise? BP is less than £500 per year for Cover

[auztin100]

Thank you for the reply.

I will try the compact, and purge option, and post the answer later today.

Hmm, thats strange I have business plus, and was quoted the following just yesterday !!



" The cover for Business Plus is £745 + VAT. "

[grantglendinnin]

Thank you for the reply.

I will try the compact, and purge option, and post the answer later today.

Hmm, thats strange I have business plus, and was quoted the following just yesterday !!

" The cover for Business Plus is £745 + VAT. "

Holy sh*t, maybe I shouldn't have said anything, serious mis-quotes here

[auztin100]

LoL - You are not cheering me up at the moment ! not only do I have serious worries about version 9 (I won't tell you what I paid !!)

I now think I am being ripped off

[leehack]

Ring them up and confirm, i've never known cover to be almost as much as the product itself.

[grantglendinnin]

This may work instead

I do think you have been overcharged somehow, especially if you bought direct from Actinic.

[pinbrook]

Whilst i agree there have been too many bugs in v9 (and V8 for that matter) it never ceases to amaze me how many people upgrade and do not test.

There are several things Actinic users can do to protect themselves.

1 Take part in beta testing
2 Upgrade and use test mode and thorougly test a load of test scenarios
3 participate more fully in this community to make themselves aware of day to day issues.

Having said that i still feel Actinic need to invest more in better and more thorough testing pre release - they have always relied too heavily on inhouse testing - more testing needs to be done in conjunction with end users. (Actinic have held a test day with developers/end users where they paid a token fee to attend - there needs to be more of this)

I sincerely hope V10 is released after more rigorous testing. I still feel there is along way to go with 9 yet, I'm still not using it.

Maybe we could start a new thread here where we collaborate and create a list of things to test prior to going live with a new version. This might help a few people and catch a few bugs before they end up on live sites

[auztin100]

Thanks for this ...

Compacting and purging made no difference.

I have been testing on another domain for over 2 months, but as you say, checking every scenario is difficult.

Surely the price tag paid for the software, and seeing as it is peoples business, and livelyhoods this software controls, we would expect simple order processing issues to have been fully tested ?

For those of us who don't have cover, I'd imagine actinic will slap a huge price on upgrading to version 10 ?? (and an even bigger one for me)

[Duncan Rounding]

...Maybe we could start a new thread here where we collaborate and create a list of things to test prior to going live with a new version. This might help a few people and catch a few bugs before they end up on live sites

Great idea. It would make a good article for the KB as well.

[auztin100]

Maybe we could start a new thread here where we collaborate and create a list of things to test prior to going live with a new version. This might help a few people and catch a few bugs before they end up on live sites

[RANT]
So no-one would ever go live, if the bug was discovered that corrupted an order, so much so that you can never look at it again ? Only saving grace is that I have an email with the details. God knows whether the sales reports will work, cross that bridge when we get round to the yearly accounts, lets hope we don't get investigated for tax .. mind you, when I phone the customer to explain, they will probably cancel the order anyway.[/RANT]

[leehack]

I disagree, this is like the thousands of articles telling people to backup their systems and they only bother once it has gone titsup. People who listen to these articles already take the correct steps. Those that do not, will always need to learn the hard way, it's just the way of the world unfortunately.

I regularly see people ignore the preview right in front of them and still upload a broken site, they just don't see things as those of us who do check.

There would be maybe 1 or 2 good points and you could argue this in itself is a good enough return from something like this, the other 99% is plain old common sense and no matter how hard you try to pass that on, people either have it or they do not, it's not teachable IMO.

The only way to prevent these issues is for the software company to release as error free software as possible. Having been part of a private beta test team on 904, i can honestly say hand on heart, that for the first time in history, i think they actually did as much as they possibly could in this area. I would not expect a single thing more than what they did for 904 personally.

[auztin100]

Are you saying I should back up before I process every order ?

So no one ever clicked "increase quantity" on an order, during testing ?

[grantglendinnin]

There would be maybe 1 or 2 good points and you could argue this in itself is a good enough return from something like this, the other 99% is plain old common sense and no matter how hard you try to pass that on, people either have it or they do not, it's not teachable IMO

The problem with common sense is it's not very common.

If you can set Windows Updates to be done at X time on Y interval (Daily, Weekly, Monthly) - perhaps an application can be derived to automatically do backups where you can customise the times they are done - so you can set it to back up at the end of every working day...might be an idea.

[leehack]

It's not aimed at you at all, you could do nothing at all I agree.