**FIRST EMAIL**/Looking for Beta Test Teams

[Andrew Schreiber]

Originally Posted by Jack Jones

I’m against it because it’s a very poor replacement for having the right information provided by the experts who designed the system and who’ve work out the bugs in the actual environment.

Jack, I am not sure what your expertise is but I can be reasonably sure it isn't in software or hardware design based on the utter naivety of this statement. Writing any non-trivial piece of software is a difficult process, finding all the bugs in it on your own is near impossible. Not only is it impossible to test all possible scenarios it is impossible to know how the software will be used. Note that I said IMPOSSIBLE. The reason we have bugs in code isn't because the people who created were lazy and didn't test their code but because they did the best they could to test all scenarios and missed some. The purpose of a beta test is to increase the chance that the majority of the bugs will have been found and fixed (or at least noted with a workaround) Under no circumstances can any non-trivial program be perfect. The same concepts apply to hardware.

I apologize if this seems harsh but I know several of the people at NI who work with FIRST, they are passionate and genuinely want to help us all out. I view your comments as slander against these hard working folks and do not feel that is appropriate.