Over at Something Unpredictable, under the post entitled, “What’s Already Broke in 2.0“, there’s a lively discussion about why WordPress 2.0 was released when:

“Many people knew that it was terribly broken. Many people begged on the wp-hackers list, the wp-forums list, the wp-testers list, and at the last IRC meetup to get the release delayed The release candidates were severly broken for a number of people, the rate of bug reporting and committing over the past two weeks is staggering. With all the changes going in, nobody stopped to take the time to test for regressions caused by the changes. Its 1.5 all over again.”

One commenter, Olly, pointed out:

“To be fair to them they have the problems that most commercial developers of popular software find, and that’s that no matter how much beta testing they do, the program will inevitably get hundreds of hours more use on the day of release than they could possibly to in the whole of testing.”

To be clear, these are indeed problems that even commercial developers face. And having worked for several years as a Software Quality Assurance Engineer for a major software company, I can tell you for a fact that expensive commercial software ships with MANY known bugs. The sad truth is that there is no such thing as bug-free software. Introducing new features, and even performing bug fixes, often break existing features (which is why regression testing is so critical). However, in the commercial software world, even when the programmers and the testers are wanting to push back the release date, it’s often the marketing department that controls when the software ‘goes gold’ - unless you found what was known as a ’stop ship bug’, which would only be a bug that would be easily encountered by a regular user AND would be bad enough to crash either the program or their entire system. Beyond that, it was do whatever it takes to get the product out the door on time (even if that means working yourself to death), and sorry ’bout the bugs that still remain.

Nonetheless, even with the idea of being ‘bug-free’ being thrown out as an impossibility, it still stands to reason that users can only tolerate a certain degree of bugginess in a product before the uproar starts. And if many of those bugs turn out to have been known for weeks or months before the release, it does beg the question as to WHY was this product released so early? Given that it is an open-source, community backed FREE piece of software, there is no monsterous marketing team breathing down your back to finish the software that they already SOLD to many customers (and promised them a ship date). There are no numbers that your sales team has to make for any particular quarter, and no shareholders to appease. So far as I can tell, there is no monetary reason to deliver the product before it is truly ready.

Also, I don’t know how open-source projects (and WordPress in particular) work when it comes to Quality Assurance - is there even a QA department, or is everyone associated with the project just expected to do continual bug testing and keep their eyes peeled for problems and anomilies? If it is the latter, that could explain somewhat why there are so many more bugs being found now that the release version has been delivered. There’s more to software testing than just looking for bugs. It involves creating test plans, regression testing, negative testing (wherein you do things with the software that you’re not supposed to and see if it handles the problem gracefully), etc. And different people need to be assigned to different areas of the software so that they are focused and really become experts in their area. It was hard enough to do with a team of well paid developers - I honestly don’t know how you get that done when it’s all volunteer effort (although I’m not saying that the WP team hasn’t incorporated all of these areas of testing as I’m not in a position to know).

But given that it is an opensource project, and apparently reliant on much of its userbase for unearthing the bugs, it would behoove both the WP community and the WordPress team to provide clear and easy to use directions on how to search for a bug in Trac and, if it’s not already listed there, enter it yourself. I’d venture to say that less than 5% of users know about Trac (WordPress’s bug tracking software), nevermind how to submit a bug they’ve found. (I just submitted my first bug: Ticket #2218: Pop-up window for inserting hyperlinks truncated on FireFox 1.5)

On wordpress.com, there is a handy little ‘Feedback’ button that appears on every admin screen designed for sending ‘bugs and hugs’, which I though was really great. I don’t know why that was omitted from WordPress 2.0 - it’s a great way for the WordPress team to interact with those WordPress users who don’t hang out in the support forums, etc.

In sum, any software project of this scope and with this large of a user base is extraordinary challenging to QA, even in the commercial world. I’d imagine it’s that much more difficult to do when everyone is working on a volunteer basis. That said, open source software has a luxury that commercial software doesn’t in that you don’t have to get the product out by a certain date in order to meet your numbers for a certain fiscal period. Any .0 release is a major release, and should have enough new features and bug fixes as well as improved existing functionality to entice existing users to upgrade. As TheBisch has mentioned, I’m not sure the features in 2.0 are compelling enough to get existing users to upgrade, especially when there are so many bugs and broken plugins, not to mention that it is likely that we’ll be seeing 2.0.1 and 2.0.2, if not 2.0.3 coming down the line shortly and have to upgrade again and ugain, all with potential upgrade fiascos (after all, that’s what we experienced with the 1.5 release, and that one seemed more stable than 2.0…) Which leaves me wondering - why was WordPress 2.0 released when there were people purportedly begging to push back the release date until more bugs were resolved??

In preparation for doing my first upgrade of an existing WP 1.5 site, I did some research first to try to ensure the process went as smoothly as possible (when I begin it – which I still haven’t gotten to yet). I almost cringe in writing this, because I truly love WordPress and everything the team has done to provide such a wonderful free blogging tool for all of us. But the truth is that I came across a number of posts hi-lighting problems people have already discovered in 2.0 and/or reasons why they don’t feel upgrading to 2.0 is worth bothering, and I’d be remiss in not reporting that.

I know that those of us who want to be on the bleeding edge will disregard all of this and upgrade to 2.0 because it’s cool and simply to have the latest (if not the greatest – although that remains to be seen) version. But for those fence-sitters, here’s some added info you might want to have in making your decision as to whether or not to upgrade your working version of WordPress 1.5.2 that you’ve been happily using to the new WordPress 2.0.

Here are some reports of problems with WordPress 2.0:

• Something Unpredictable has an article entitled, “What’s Already Broke in 2.0”
• Ryan Duff writes about how and why he downgraded from WordPress 2.0 back to WordPress 1.5
• 24fc wrote a detailed diatribe about why he’s “mightily disappointed” in WordPress 2.0 (including problems with trackbacks and permalinks) over in the support forums
• Brendan details problems he encountered in trying to upgrade to WordPress 2.0, (although he now seems to have made some progress in the upgrade, and is actually working on creating a WP 2.0 Theme) summarizing that:
  

  “If you use WordPress as standard, the upgrade should, more or less work. If you use cat2tag, ultimate tag warrior or deviate away even just a smidgen from the standard install (and lets face it, an increasingly large base of the WordPress community does) - then expect things to break.. badly.

  In my case the upgrade took a horrible toll on the database - the new WP db version is not backwards compatible - if you take the ‘upgrade’ path, perform a backup first or the results will be, well, unpleasant.”

And then there are others who have documented why they’re not upgrading:

• WordPress 2.0… Who Cares?, which provides an extremely detailed feature by feature list of why TheBisch hasn’t found a compelling enough reason to upgrade. In sum – he doesn’t think the new features are ‘all that’. He also points out that a lot of what’s new in WP2.0 pertains to code in the back-end which is designed to make things worlds easier for WP developers (those folks who create all the wonderful plug-ins we all can’t live without, as well as those who make the themes and templates which then personify our blogs). That’s great for developers, but for those who are blogging it doesn’t do them a spec of good JUST YET. First the developers need to use all those fabulous new hooks, etc to create plug-ins and themes which are compatible with v2.0, and that’s gonna take some time (even if it is easier for them to do than in v1.5). But it does mean that down the road we can expect newer and greater plug-ins with features we might never have even imagined possible – we just have to give the developers time to do their genius stuff. And in TheBisch’s mind, until that happens and bugs are hammered out, he doesn’t see a reason to bother with the upgrade.
• Phu Ly, an accomplished WP 1.5 Theme(Gentle Calm, Flex, Gespaa..) and Plug-in author writes Why If..Else has not been upgraded to WP 2.0
• Tamba2, who actually wrote one of the upgrade guides, is actually NOT upgrading himself and posts his reasoning here

If you’re not upgrading, Asymptomatic would like to know why not, and asks that you comment on his post to provide your own reasons for the choice not to upgrade (or upgrade problems that you’ve personally encountered) – to date, there are 106 responses to that post and many of them are rather informative — I’d highly recommend anyone considering upgrading give this post and it’s comments a good read.

In a response to a post by Phu Ly, Asymptomatic wrote the following giving his take on all the comments on his post regarding upgrading to 2.0

“It’s certainly not for everyone.

To generalize on most of the answers I’ve read so far, the response is one of:

1) I’m not upgrading because my favorite plugin/theme doesn’t work.

2) I’m not upgrading because there is no benefit to me over what I have

3) I’m not upgrading because of flaws in the development/testing/release process for which I’ll wait for patches.

Any of these could also factor heavily into one’s decision to upgrade some blogs and not others.”

All in all, there have been a lot of people saying there’s just too much work and too many chances of problems incurring, coupled with too little incentive for them to do the upgrade. However, many of these same folk have said that they would use WordPress 2.0 if they were doing a fresh install for new blog.

As for me, I feel I owe it to the WP team, as well as to all of my blog readers to perform an upgrade on at least one of my WP 1.5 blogs so that I can report back what my own experiences with it were and whether I’d choose to do it again on other blogs. And I *will* do this. However, given the reports of time consuming problems that could be encountered, and that I’m super short on time b/c I’m crazy behind in my work that pays the bills, it could be a few days or even longer before I can tackle this project.

Something Unpredictable has generously created a script to “downgrade your WordPress database in the event that you, like me, feel that 2.0 still needs some work”.

If you’re experiencing upgrader’s remorse, you can use this script to get your WP install back down to 1.5