I want to throw a question out to the community.

• Before applying UPD releases in your production environments, what type of internal testing do you perform to ensure none of the IFS native processes are broken? 
  • Such as logging on / off Shop Floor Workbench, Processing an Estimate, Opening/Closing Projects, etc.  These would be IFS core functionality, that you as an organization did not customize.
• We have only been IFS customers for 3 years, does IFS historically release bug prone software?
  • We’ve experienced bugs with nearly every UPD we released.  The most impacted module for us has been the Estimating module.

Some background into why I’m asking.

Our organization used to perform internal testing on the business processes using our AST scripts that we had developed during our initial launch.  Over the years, as we’ve had employee turnover and onboarded new users, this process became less fruitful and more of a box checking exercise for departments.  We would release updates, processes failed that departments claimed to have tested, and we’d have to wait for the UPD release that contains the fix.

We’ve come across this now with our Estimating module, there is a bug in UPD 20 that renders the Estimating module useless.  It puts the wrong quantity per assembly in the component parts when you add them to your Estimate, causing a huge variance in your quote to the customer.  It’s bug fix# 16687.   We are now in a position where we cannot perform Estimates in IFS until we receive a UPD which takes months.  We have two active cases open with IFS, one for the bug CS0208913 and one for the UPD CS0207020.

It’s crazy to think that with the size of the IFS R&D that UPD 20 could make it to customers.  It takes all of a few minutes to see when building an Estimate that there’s a huge problem.  There’s another bug in UPD 20 where you can’t click the print button to print native IFS reports, we chose to still release since you can hit the Preview button but still - how does this get missed?

The IT team may start to add some of these modules to our own checklist and take the burden off the rest of the departments to verify, but where do we stop testing?  I thought IFS did at least some internal testing, but maybe I’m wrong.  We already check all of our own customizations, TAS, API’s, Printing, Report Rendering, and other plugins.