Quicken 2008 Release 5

A question for readers of this group: Has there ever before been a Quicken release that needed four updates (r2, r3, r4, r5) by early December?

John

Definitely a new record for Intuit and their off-shore programming staff.

I didn't know this. When did they start off-shoring programmers? My last version used was 2004.

To my knowledge, it's been at least a few years. If anyone else has more accurate info, please provide.

I'd like to see even a shred of evidence that Intuit has its programming done overseas.

Thank you Andrew; my initial assumption stands corrected.

Now let me see concrete evidence that programmers in South Asia (or any other country) are less competent, or produce lower quality products than, let's say, American programmers.

By the way John, just to set the record straight, I agree. I personally have absolutely NO problem with "off shore" (I actually detest the term) programmers. (Who are where the products are made doesn't interest me in the slightest if the quality is maintained. We're in a world wide economy and as a result, in total, I think things can only go up. I've had some clunkers over there, but I also have had a couple of Microsoft techkies walk me through a networking problem on some of their products that were simply great and really knew their stuff.

A few years back (well, maybe more than a few!), Japanese-made products were considered cheap. I remember as a kid (40+ years ago) their toys had a reputation that things would break in just 5 minutes. Well, given 25 years, look at them now. A few years back, American cars couldn't compete with Japanese imports. But now, Japan is having its troubles and a model of Chevolet (I believe) is giving the Corolla a run for the money in terms of units being sold - competition is only good for the end consumer.

Intuit has a major office up here in Edmonton, Alberta, you know.

Quicken is at r5 and it's not even next year yet.

...and it's not even Beta quality yet!

I retired from software development in 2006. I used to develop test drivers and device drivers for just about all of the various operating systems for use in testing storage devices. I worked with Indian programmers on some projects. They were very sharp, friendly, hard working guys. They were always willing to take turns working nights in order to be available for conference calls. The code that they developed was as good as most of what I saw from the American programmers.

I'm not a fan of high tech American jobs being shipped overseas, but it seems inevitable. I just think that our government should stop offering tax incentives for doing it.

I don't have Q-2008, so I can't speculate about the quality of it. I just bought 2007 at Amazon. But, the release numbers don't necessarily mean that the quality of the developers is poorer. The reduced costs of development may let them accelerate patch releases. Instead of waiting until 10 things are fixed, they can release updates for each one of them. I don't know if that is the case, but it is a possibility.

Also, from reading here, one release was a security update for the file encryption. Those are the kind of things that probably wouldn't have gotten done with the higher price of developing software in the US. For less money, they can hire more programmers in India than they could here.

IMHO, the Q08 quality is very poor. There were way too many bugs (the tax planner was flat-out broken), and the application behaves in a way indicating its internal structure is messed up. Like, the screen often flickers 10 or more times when doing an operation, because the code isn't sure what's really on the screen, so it's playing the, "let's be safe and repaint those controls," game.

IMHO, the four updates aren't because they're "accelerating" patches. (But, nice try. :-) )

I think the quality problems in Intuit's products aren't the fault of programmers, developers, or testers per se. That is, the problem isn't that Mary is sitting at her keyboard doing Java or C coding, and makes a mistake, and writes crappy code.

The problem, if there is one (and I think there is, but I'm sure others do not), is one of software project management. Whether the developers and testers are here or in Vietnam doesn't matter. What does matter is how their development cycles are managed, what metrics they use, the testing done before a release, whether a tester can pull the brake cord on a release, how open the communication paths are, etc.

You have to manage offshore development differently than developers who live down the hall from you. IMHO, local development is superior to offshore development for new products, but offshore can pay off in routine maintenance or testing. But no matter _what_ you choose to do, each development team type needs different kinds of project management and communication styles.

IMHO, Intuit has fallen flat on its face with Q08, and I think whomever is responsible for development and test management, and for product direction, ought to have their head on a platter. Q08 is a joke. Most of the new features are eye candy and/or are "improvements" on things that simply didn't need improvement. And while I don't, like anyone else here, know Intuit's internal bug reporting, I'm very sure that this app has been way more buggy than other apps I've bought, of equal or greater complexity.

Just my $.02. Flames welcome. Not that they will need an invitation. :-)

John

That's been the case for a number of years now and the major reason why many people including myself have gone to a every other or third year update cycle.

I just today went from 2006 Deluxe to 2008 Deluxe and aside from the transaction attachments, haven't seen anything worth the update.

To Intuit's part, there really isn't a lot you can do for a mature product like a personal finance tracker. All the groundbreaking features were figured out years ago. Now they have to come up with reasons to get people to upgrade every year and that's hard.

The lazy approach is to try to get people to convert to a subscription model. That takes the pressure off Intuit to perform and a reason why I would never subscribe to such a model.

-- "Tell me what I should do, Annie." "Stay. Here. Forever." - Life On Mars

I agree entirely, and I do the same.

Absolutely right.

Ken Blake wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com:

I agree completely. I do every other year now too (but I had to test

2007 for unrelated reasons). Personally, I think that a subscription model of $20-25/year would be fine if Ituit would really pay attention to fixing things. IMO that should be better for their bottom line in the long run as well (but I have been wrong before).

Let me backtrack a bit from what I wrote previously, I was not intending to say the programmers were worse than the US counterparts. No matter where you look, there is a range of programmer competence, whether it is the US or India or Eastern Europe. The trick is to latch onto the good ones when you outsource, and manage them and the process properly.

(btw, congratulations on your retirement. I'm looking forward to retiring soon after 35 years of software engineering...)

Intuit could fix long-standing bugs and reinstate the features tha thave been removed recently.

How about making the Mac and Windows versions compatible? Sure would be nice to be able to move a data file between the two, having to do nothing more than copy the file from one to the other.

I'd upgrade for that.