If you’ve recently tried to register or reset your password at Rat’s Reading and never got a confirmation mail, things should be working now.
And let me rant a bit about Wordpress and open source! It’s not truly reading related, so I’m lucky this goes in the Site Announcements
category.
The underlying cause in this was a change in how Wordpress handles From
addresses in it’s mailing functions. I haven’t fixed it. I worked around it. I believe ticket #5007 is the problem (fixed mailing for FastHosts, but broke it for Bluehost).
To the people who run Wordpress (yes, you Matt Mullenweg), you really really need to improve your development processes. This sort of thing wouldn’t have happened at my previous employers. But because you are a developer-run organization, you’ve given really short-shrift to your testing procedures. Just awful. So here’s a suggestion or three:
- Establish a testing framework. The
code it and throw it out for people to try in betas
thing doesn’t work. You have a bug database, there’s a difference. - The test framework should be automated.
- The test framework should include reproductions all the hosting environments that are linked from Wordpress.org.
- The test plan should always include a regression pass.
- Check in test cases like you do your code. After you’ve set up the testing framework noted above, your repository should include versioned test cases. It should be just as visible as the code. If Wordpress doesn’t pass the test cases as shown in the repository, it shouldn’t be released.
- Any reported bug should be converted into a test case and checked into the repository.
- Test cases should only be removed from your repository with the same amount of scrutiny that you accept bugs and patches. In other words, don’t let people remove a test case just because Wordpress fails it.
One Comment
Thanks KR! I feel lurved again.
In all fairness, it’s not really just the open-source community. DH and I have worked in the Support/ish area for a number of IT companies over the years and there’s the same slack attitude towards testing everywhere. In a salaried community, Testing is a loathed function, often seen as nothing more than a bunch of people rubber-stamping the oh! so wonderful work done by the halo-headed developers (genuflect here). In a volunteer community, it’s perceived as so boring that nobody wants to do it.
In our jobs, we’ve usually mandated that we accept the position on the proviso that QA has the power to stop a product in its tracks if it’s deficient. That has made us both extremely unpopular, especially with the developers, but is the only way you can run things. Perhaps WordPress (hell, every damn software company out there!) could do something similar.