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At 03:19 AM 4/27/2008, VK wrote:
>Bob, just as a matter of interest, did anything that happens to anyone else
>related to TS ever happen to you? It seems to me that you are the one person
>running the most stable TS version around (except of PO, ofcourse) ;).
I was a VP of engineering of a large commercial software business in my last "real job" so I know a bit about modern software development processes. So it is pretty apparent that TradeStation is by no means using up-to-date processes that result in good quality.
This is usually not because the company doesn't have good engineers who know how to do it right. It is usually because the management won't let them for lot of commercial reasons - they need the new features NOW to keep selling the product, etc.
And there are now modern software development tools that let you check for all kinds of potential problems while in development but they are expensive so perhaps they don't have them. And then there are well known regression testing, alpha, and beta testing processes which they do not seem to follow.
They seem to be releasing builds fairly frequently with little testing but only to a few customers at a time. Those customers are basically doing the testing. They limit the number so that the poor tech support people can handle the load. As they find bugs, they continue to release new bug-fix builds until the product becomes stable, usually several months after a new feature release.
The market for this kind of software is pretty small so maybe that is all they can afford. Certainly no commercial customer would put up with that level of quality from a vendor but they do not seem to be interested in supplying software to large companies so probably don't care.
So I never load a new version for at least several months after it is released. I just switched to 8.3 recently from 8.2.
I also keep the CPU load down by turning off the "Update value intra-bar" option on all indicators unless I really need it on. The default is "on" for some stupid reason and it can increase the CPU load by a factor of 10 on a busy symbol such as ES.
And when I load a new build I always do a fresh install, not an update install. This starts with everything fresh. I first export all my code from the previous version into a ELD file then import what I need into the new version as I need it. This gets all new data and cleans out lots of old stuff. When you import a workspace from a previous version, it tends to clean up any problems in that workspace.
So, in summary, I guess that I understand how they are developing the software and can anticipate what the problems are likely to result from that process. I then try to adapt my usage to minimize the likely impact of their process. I really didn't realize I was doing this until I started writing this message...
They have added lots of great features over the years that are very useful. It is a shame that they cannot get the quality right. But like everything else in this world, we need to adapt to it the way it is if we want to keep using it.
Bob Fulks
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