Re: Noughts and Crosses game

On May 19, 10:18 am, Patricia Shanahan <p...@xxxxxxx> wrote:
Greg R. Broderick wrote:
"printdude1...@xxxxxxxxx" <printdude1...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in
news:1179542764.131713.177460@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx:

would be accepted by someone calling a help desk and wanting help?
The reason I ask is, that while I agree 100% with this approach, in my
job as a tech support person, I would be hung out to dry if I told my
customers that I was not able to take on their issues because they
couldn't reproduce the problem.

IMO, part of your job as a technical support person is to gather enough
information from the client so that _you_ can reproduce the issue. You can
then document the issue, and how you reproduced it, in your report to your
developers. That's how it worked when I did tech support -- bugs that
couldn't get reproduced didn't get passed up to the developers, but the
support rep continued eliciting more information from the customer until
the issue was reproducible.

What about timing dependent bugs that happen once every few days? I've
seen bugs that, even given the right workloads, only happened with just
the right timing between several parallel activities.

Admittedly, my worst experiences along that line involved multiprocessor
servers, where many threads could really run at the same time, but the
trend is towards hardware multithreading, multiple cores in each
processor chip, and multiple processor chips on each motherboard.

Patricia


Here's a good one... "log off, reboot and the problem goes away".
Seriously, a good 60-75% of the issues I see can be solved this way.
Those are the easiest to solve, but figuring why it works is often a
long process.

.

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