Tech Support Nightmare (Kinda funny, kinda sad)

dynamik

I don't know whether I should laugh or cry for the people who have to support this: http://kotaku.com/gaming/lethal-update/eve-online-trinity-update-kills-xp-330805.php

JDMurray

Was the new update was just so compelling that not one tester ever rebooted?

This is exactly the case. The testing computers will either be running VMWare or have their hard disks re-imaged prior to testing. Unless you think to include rebooting in your test plans, you never need to reboot a test computer's OS.

CoryS

You know I never thought about that, I have rebooted my VMs many many times but in all these months I have yet to even have the thought cross my mind about the need to reboot the host. I remote into all of them and have gotten into the mindset that these were actual machines... Weird how the brain works after the effects of time take their toll.

My old coworker who was our Q/A supervisor (in a team of 2) had days like this, we would pound out tons of scenarios but if for instance he had 3 machines all testing the same thing there would be times that simple things like this would slip under the rug and although we had in this case, rebooted Win2k and WinXP, it was just assumed we rebooted Vista..

I feel bad for the testing team, but I feel more bad that programming like this can be implemented in the first place. How any obscure game can literally blow away such a critical system file is very odd to me.