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Re: EA Breaks Silence!
I used to work on a special product development group in a software company, so I've lived the life these EA ****ers are experiencing, and I can tell you, it's not fun.
Here's what's happening, just a guess, but it's probably not far off the mark...
1) Every software development team has 1 or 2 guys who really know what the eff they're doing, and about 5-10 people who are just along for the ride.
2) During the course of the project, those 5-10 who don't know what they're doing eventually learn enough from the top software studs to support the product, or maybe to fool themselves into thinking they could've done it better.
3) When the product is released as version 1.0 or 1.1, the top developers leave. They're either contractors who go to work for another company, or they're internal employees who get poached by another development team to work on the latest, hottest project.
4) After a while, all kinds of sh!t starts happening with the original release of the product, like we've been seeing with BF2. Problem is, the software studs are on another project, so it's left to their proteges to fix the damn thing, and sometimes that works out, and sometimes it doesn't.
5) In the case of BF2, it's pretty obvious that some protege of the original development team's software studs thinks he can fix BF2, and had convinced his bosses (who are desperate to get the stupid product off their agendas and move on to something else), that his fix was solid & stable, because he tested it all weekend.
We all know the result, and we're living it. Never, ever ever let the developers test their own software. It's rule #1 of any project like this. Yet I'll bet dollars to donuts that this is precisely what EA did, because they (1) ran out of budget for contract testers, (2) the QC group told them to get stuffed when they asked for a weekend of testing time, and (3) all the developers who have any talent at all and who worked on the development of BF2 have already been poached by other managers for other projects, like BF2142 or some damn sports game.
I used to work on a special product development group in a software company, so I've lived the life these EA ****ers are experiencing, and I can tell you, it's not fun.
Here's what's happening, just a guess, but it's probably not far off the mark...
1) Every software development team has 1 or 2 guys who really know what the eff they're doing, and about 5-10 people who are just along for the ride.
2) During the course of the project, those 5-10 who don't know what they're doing eventually learn enough from the top software studs to support the product, or maybe to fool themselves into thinking they could've done it better.
3) When the product is released as version 1.0 or 1.1, the top developers leave. They're either contractors who go to work for another company, or they're internal employees who get poached by another development team to work on the latest, hottest project.
4) After a while, all kinds of sh!t starts happening with the original release of the product, like we've been seeing with BF2. Problem is, the software studs are on another project, so it's left to their proteges to fix the damn thing, and sometimes that works out, and sometimes it doesn't.
5) In the case of BF2, it's pretty obvious that some protege of the original development team's software studs thinks he can fix BF2, and had convinced his bosses (who are desperate to get the stupid product off their agendas and move on to something else), that his fix was solid & stable, because he tested it all weekend.
We all know the result, and we're living it. Never, ever ever let the developers test their own software. It's rule #1 of any project like this. Yet I'll bet dollars to donuts that this is precisely what EA did, because they (1) ran out of budget for contract testers, (2) the QC group told them to get stuffed when they asked for a weekend of testing time, and (3) all the developers who have any talent at all and who worked on the development of BF2 have already been poached by other managers for other projects, like BF2142 or some damn sports game.
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