Chris Pattinson

We typically ask our beta testers for their final feedback on a release. For RAD XE, we have some of the best feedback we’ve ever seen and I definitely think it’s worth sharing.

For a frame of reference, we had several hundred of our historically best beta testers in XE. We invited those that had a history of strong participation and feedback, as well as all our technical partners.  These folks offer plenty of constructive criticism, QC reports, and measured feedback that we take very seriously.

1) As of today, 79% of survey respondents indicated RAD XE is superior to RAD 2010, which was a solid release. 21% consider it about the same. There were no negative replies in the bottom two categories, which is really amazing.

2) Performance feedback: 60% excellent "hardly notice performance as an issue" and 40% Good "accomplishing tasks without much wait. These were the two top options of four, which is the best we’ve seen ever.

3) Stability feedback: 55% Excellent "rarely see a problem", and 43% Good "only occasional issues". 2% Fair "can get tasks done".  The team is still working with the beta testers to find what those occasional issues might be.  This is also the strongest feedback we’ve seen in several years of releases.

What was really impressive though were some of the beta tester general comments on the survey, which I’ll share a few:

• The BEST Delphi since version 7. A real game changer, anyone not using Delphi needs to re-evaluate. Can’t wait for the OSX and 64bit future builds to come. GREAT WORK everyone at embarcadero.
• Haven’t personally seen any stop-ship issues, and over-all very happy with final product. Since I’m on SA I’ve already installed the release and am switching from RS2010 to XE as my default IDE.
• Thanks for the team, I have reported 18 bugs and some feature enhancements and now 13 bugs have been fixed in the Fulcrum.
• Well, I’m a win32-guy and I really like the new release.
• Great job! The fit and finish of XE is very good and a big incremental step forward. Compared to Weaver, XE is a good upgrade well worth our SA dollars. Compared all previous releases it is a superb upgrade
• The release looks good; it feels like a solid improvement over 2010, and I’ll be a happy user of some new features.

As an interesting data point - 42% of our beta testers use Windows 7, with the majority on Windows 7 64 bit.  Many of the Embarcadero folks develop and test with Windows 7 as well - I happen to have one in my office running many of Embarcadero products including XE and All-Access.

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This entry was posted on Friday, September 10th, 2010 at 7:46 am and is filed under General, Quality Assurance, RADStudio. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.