First SP2 HotFiix Available

[cacosapo]

It's like a Blizzard game...I'll GLADLY WAIT till it's DONE. Sure, it takes longer..sure, they still get patched, but guess what? The patches WORK and they don't break my ability to play D2 when I'm patching WC3 or whatever... [/B]

Nah, blizzard did the same mistakes as MS.

You cant even compare making a game with making on OS, but:

a) they did a lot of mistakes on D2, fixing a problem and introducing 100.
b) now d2 is good but now is too late (it lost the glamour because its old)
c) They really impact your ability to play, since they introduced a series of "tricks" to avoid cheating, but turns the game sometimes hard to connect.

so everybody on software development make the same mistake. They cant wait until its perfect because when that times comes NOBODY will still using that software.

[Vorlin]

I should've said that in comparison to other game makers where patches are few and far between or are filled with trivial "fixes" (read: Dice's "patches" for BF1942 which are 95% consisting of the movies that everyone deletes), or simply don't come at all (read: PoTC). Sure, it's not a comparison between an OS-maker and a game maker, but MS has failed in more areas, especially considering security and stability (gotten better with XP) when they're "improving" ease of use and glitziness.

[SDK]

Bah... Most game are full of bugs! Most of the game are rush into the market except for highly wait game like World of War Craft, Doom 3, Hafe Life 2

[mohaughn]

You can't say that it is impossible to build code that is for the most part free of defects.. The Carnegie Mellon SEI Capability Maturity Model gives a very detailed path that a company can work through to be able to have the capabilities to build almost completely error free software... Most experts agree that 3.4 defects per million is considered to be almost perfect code, and probably the highest "perfection" that we can hope to obtain. Six Sigma is another quality paradigm that is sometimes used to measure the outputs of CMM. Six Sigma dictates that a perfect application would be available 99.999999% of the time. The six comes about because of the six trailing 9's. If you are 99% available you could have as many as 10k defects per million.. Quit a bit... 99.999999% is where the 3.4 defects per mil. number comes from.

The only companies who use this method of developing software are companies like IBM, AT&T, Boeing, Lockhead, etc... Mainly companies that develop software for the government and for aerospace. NASA is a huge proponent of CMM. Even then, on a project such as WindowsXP which has approximately 40million lines of code that would be 136 total errors in WinXP. Definitely a lot less than we have now. My targets for the machines I manage are 250 DPMs per year.

If you could come up with an affordable and functional way for a company to rapidly develop consumer grade software while adhering to the standards dictated by level5 of the CMM you would more than likely be a billionaire before you died... Right now it just isn't cost effective for the consumer grade software companies to undertake a huge project such as trying to get CMM level5 certification for their development cycles..

If they did get to level5 their predictions as to when the software would be done would be tremendously accurate and they would be able to better gauge when to start working on new products. Gone would be the days of saying it'll be released Q4'04 and then it really coming out in Q2'06. There are currently some projects underway to try and integrate some of the RAD software development cycles into the CMM-I stucture.. So we may start to see better consumer grade software from the companies that are keeping their development models up to date.