>> Are you saying that 2008 was better than 2009, or just that they have yet to get everything fixed before they add new stuff to break?
One of the biggest problems they have going on right now is many things were designed improperly, so now making any sort of change to the program is having a huge ripple effect through the entire thing.
They aren't really at the point where all they need to do is track down some bugs and fix them. They need to completely redesign many key aspects of C3D. If they don't, things won't change. Software built on a bad foundation is like a house built on a bad foundation. You can spend lots of extra time and money building really strong and thick walls, but it won't help the bad foundation. It merely creates a more-impressive failure when the whole thing crashes on the bad foundation.
Right now, Autodesk is busily adding things onto a bad foundation. That's a large part of why they can't manage to fix any of the big problems, and why every new release is a such a huge mass of bugs, and why they basically gave up trying to handle the interoperability issue. As they fix one problem or add a new feature, it ripples through other aspects of the program, and fixing those other pieces introduces yet more ripples, and so on. This eats up huge amounts of development time, and they still can't keep track of all the ripples. The only way to fix this is to fix the core problems in the design. Autodesk isn't doing that, because it would mean redoing a lot of work. But each year, they are adding more and more "stuff" on top of that bad foundation, and it's getting tougher and tougher to fix those core problems.
The rest of it falls squarely on the heels of bad software design processes. And a software design process is more than the development team. It's the company as a whole. Right now, parts of Autodesk are setting up other parts for failure. It puts people like the C3D design team in a bad position, where they get blamed for all these problems, but it's really the overall processes. The individual developers cannot fix the overall processes - only the people at the top can do that.
Unfortunately, the way things are going now, Autodesk will continue to bang away at C3D until they hit too many problems to solve, and some third-party comes up with a better solution. Then they will buy that other solution, and ditch C3D. Then we'll have the whole LDT to C3D transition all over again, except substitute different names for the products.
This is *NOT* the only way to design software. It is simply the way Autodesk is designing software. But they're not alone - many other software companies are in the same boat. If the construction industry had the same failure rate as the software industry, we'd all be living in tents and fording rivers, because we wouldn't trust ANY buildings or bridges. Companies are beginning to learn, slowly. There are more companies now with good software processes than there were 10 years ago. But the industry as a whole is still in its infancy, and has a lot to learn.
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Sinc
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