FWIW, I’m in the camp with RustySpoon and Mario that say to cut PGMusic a bit of slack. To those that “just want it done now and done right” you should know that the development of complex software is no walk in the park.

Circa 2006 my company was awarded a “small” (several $million) exploratory contract to develop the flight control system for a new presidential helicopter, commonly known as Marine One. Although I wasn’t part of the software team per-se, I did need to interface with that department on a regular basis to do my job and would empathize with the challenges they faced.

A single flight control computer is a complex beast in it’s own right; the system we worked on contained four. Computer A would monitor its own health and the health of the other 3. Likewise Computer B would monitor its own health and that of the other 3, and so on. Every major clock cycle they would all vote (and never disagree) as to who was most healthy; and control of the aircraft would be automatically given to that computer. This is called quad-redundancy and is extremely complex to design and troubleshoot. So complex, that specialized software needed to be developed to produce the test matrices and to analyze the resulting fault logs. The test software would run 24/7/365.

I’m not saying that BiaB is as complex as the above described system and I have no idea whether PGMusic uses test software versus human-only beta testers. If human testers, then perhaps they could consider borrowing testing methods from other domains, such as aerospace.

I’m just offering my 2 pennies in the hope this could be useful to someone in the testing or QC departments. Rather than simply complain about this or that disappointment, the spirit should be to offer ideas to help PGMusic remain competitive in their chosen business domain. With the advent of AI, the competition is likely to increase.

Software testing is indeed a “thorny bush”, and let’s remember that a big part of the software design process is to not break existing features (that work well) when new features are incorporated.

Let’s cut them some slack.

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For me there’s no better place in the band than to have one leg in the harmony world and the other in the percussive. Thank you Paul Tutmarc and Leo Fender.