DemoTools - questions and answers: program error

The program has a bug - why don't you test the software before distribution?

There is no software in the world that is totally bug-free. Those, who pretend their code is absolutely correct have just not found the glitch (or are dealing with trivial routines). If the Microsoft corporation with thousands of software engineers had to release dozens of versions and bug-fixes before most of their application software was reasonable stable, it is absolutely impossible for a small developer to iron-out each and every bug in a software package. (Please also remember that NASA only recently lost a multi-million dollar space craft in deep space, because someone mixed up meters and inches in the navigation software.) So - if you find a bug in the DemoTools software, please tell us. We will try our best to correct it, and - if necessary - release a bug-fix for downloading.

Of course, we are also extensively testing our software packages. However, there is a limitation to what we can do - simply because of the mind-boggling large number of error possibilities. Just to give you an example: We have to test the software for 5 (internally quite different) operating systems: MS-Windows '95, MS-Windows '98, MS-Windows ME, MS-Windows NT4, and MS-Windows 2000. Each of these operating systems has a number of "Service Releases". Contrary to popular belief it is not guaranteed that a software which runs under MS-Windows '95 would also run under MS-Windows 2000. If you also take into account that users might have thousands of different hardware configurations, you can see that the a complete testing is simply impossible - primarily for economic reasons.