User Review 5

  You Always Touch a Running System!

  As a developer, you know the old saying, "Never touch a running system". But in fact you always do, you have to. And that almost inevitably adds new bugs to your software and bugs are mean: They always strike on the customer's computer, never in your own test lab. That's why we use EurekaLog.

  In early 2007 we were confronted with just such a situation: Our flagship product Help & Manual was ten years old, and although the old application architecture had served us well for many years, it was time to redesign the software and bring it up to speed for the new features we wanted to implement. The changes were major, including migration of the source to the latest version of Borland Delphi 2007, a completely new user interface (the DevExpress Ribbon), transition from a single to a multi-document UI and support for concurrent multi-user editing on the same XML source files. Full Unicode support was a given, too. The most serious change, however, was abstraction of the user interface from the data. Not only to support XML but also to allow us to store our XML data anywhere we want: in files, zip archives, databases, you name it.

  Each of the modifications above on its own was enough to give any developer sleepless nights. All of them together were the stuff that nightmares are made of, because the potential for bugs was simply gigantic. We needed a system that would enable us to find bugs early and accurately retrieve all the information needed to duplicate them in our testing environments, even if they occurred under circumstances we had never imagined or planned for.

  My colleague had already used EurekaLog with great success in other projects of his own. Integration was painless and I particularly appreciate the extensive customization options. EurekaLog significantly reduced the Help & Manual 5's time-to-market, just as as Help & Manual does for its user's documentation and online help.