The pre-release Mambo 4.6.2 Bug Stomp has now closed. The team got some very good feedback from those who downloaded and tested it and we are now working hard to fix the bugs that were reported and put the finishing touches on 4.6.2 to ready it for release.
What is interesting is that to date 2,004 people have downloaded the Bug Stomp release. Yet only a handful of people gave us feedback by reporting issues. Does that mean that not much less than 2,000 people didn’t find any problems? Somehow, I doubt this.
The Mambo users who visit the forums possibly don’t realise how important their feedback is. The team cannot hope to test Mambo on every server setup, on all operating systems or across many different versions of Apache, PHP and MySQL. Yet, sure as anything, code we test carefully will prove to misbehave on someone’s system!
Feedback is also important for more than bug testing though. Mambo has an advantage over many other open source projects in that it has experienced users within the development team who have put Mambo through its paces for many years, often pushing the envelope to get additional functionality, and sometimes using Mambo in ways that the earlier developers had not anticipated. So, Mambo development is not just about producing code, nor about programmers experimenting with the latest and greatest web effects. It’s about a whole of team approach to producing a CMS that meets most people’s needs.
However, our team is tiny when compared to the number of Mambo users. With well over 5 million downloads, we cannot be expected to know how all Mambo users work with Mambo, what everyone needs or wants Mambo to do, what features should be added or what could be removed. This is why feedback from users is very important.
There has never, ever been any software developed that was perfect. All software throws up bugs somewhere, on some systems, in some circumstances. It would be nice to think that those few bugs that were reported in our Bug Stomp were the only bugs in our pre-release 4.6.2. I wonder how many of the 2,004 who downloaded it will find some bugs AFTER we release it? It’s almost enough to give a hard-working dev nightmares!
