No, sweenish182, not everyone knew. In fact, there were many that didn’t know the rollout was coming at all.
You’re quick to call my post was pointless but you seemed to miss that I was directly answering the OP’s question: A question that demonstrated they didn’t understand that there was a staged rollout.
You also seemed to have missed the date on the post. It was made while the rollout was in progress, not afterward. So my reply wasn’t weeks old at all.
There’s an old credo in IT that you’re forgivably not familiar with: The only true test is production. Meaning, there’s never a guarantee that testing will catch everything; only the release does.
And yes it applies to all software, Apple’s, your company’s, etc. You simply aren’t privy to what goes on behind the scenes after any software is released.
If your releases are constantly having catastrophic issues, the problem is you, not the nature of the beast. The latest linux kernel RC is a prime example. I’d consider it catastrophic, but they caught it before GA, because their testing is rigorous. OBVIOUSLY testing won’t catch every single issue, and you thinking I implied that is putting words in my mouth.
I am well ****ing aware that my company releases a firmware as GA and we immediately start working bug reports that come in. I don’t know if you think I’m stupid or what, but I clearly mentioned catastrophic errors. The kind that absolutely should be caught by testing before release. I’m not talking about the usual bugs that are part and parcel with dev work. Staged rollouts are companies cheaping out on their own QA. It makes perfect sense for them say they’re being cautious, they obviously only want to brick a small percentage of devices (that customers are not compensated for) when they push untested code as GA. It doesn’t excuse the practice.
So again, if they don’t feel confident in the release, which an extremely slow staged rollout signals, they should have kept it in beta, not sent emails, and kept working on it behind the scenes, testing all the while.
I never said anything remotely like that, nor is it true by itself. What was said was it’s prudent to take precautions to avoid them.
The words you chose explicitly stated that something should not be released based off an catastrophic issue, which would require seeing into the future. And since that makes no sense, the next best assumption is that you meant that it shouldn’t be released until all bugs are found. But, you also claim to understand that’s not always possible. So by your attempted logic, it would never get released for fear of what may have been missed.
What your company does is irrelevant. You simply don’t understand mitigation tactics taken by any company in these circumstances. Staged rollouts are used all over the tech industry when the stakes are high. Just recently Google rolled out new features to Chrome mobile in batches. That way, if there had been an incident, their entire mobile browser isn’t brought down all at once.
You don’t have to like staged rollouts, sweenish182, but they are very much a reality, and not just with blizzard. It’s fine to not like them, but at least try to understand what it is that you don’t like.
Not at all. That’s you stretching my words to fit your apologist narrative.
You know how botched this rollout was? My old client had to notify me to do it manually. About a full quarter after announce (in a few weeks…). The control panel was unable to uninstall it. My client folder had multiple versions residing within it. I couldn’t delete the main folder in spite of ensuring all processes were closed, and had to use Unlocker to schedule the deletion on the next reboot. I likely have dead registry keys now, because none of Blizzard’s support pages on manually uninstalling the client mention it.
One can hope that the new client is not a hot spaghetti mess, but again, their obvious lack of testing, as evidenced by their pathetically slow rollout, does not promote much faith.
And I understand perfectly well what I don’t like about staged rollouts. I think I mentioned it in EVERY. SINGLE. POST. I. MADE. “The only real test is production. Ergo, we’ll make production our only test. QED. Me so smart.”
Educating someone on how the industry works is hardly apologetic.
I had no issues with the deployment just like the vast, vast majority of users. So, no sweenish182, just because your personal system had issues doesn’t mean the rollout/update/app were unequivocally “botched”.