Mikrotik developers should read carefully the article below.

http://www.spinellis.gr/blog/20140925/index.html


Mikrotik should respect it's clients and stop publishing untested buggy versions.

Gentlemen, this is not a children game. You can't just play with our system's stability.
If you need people to debug and test your software just say so. And pay the people for that.

We need our systems to roll, we have clients who pay us out there, and we cannot tolerate
the malfunction of our systems, due to bad new-version-software.

Be proffesionals and do what you are supposed to do.

Thanks for your time

You are right. On the other hand, what makes you to upgrade if your network works correctly? And of course why you are upgrading without proper testing? Of course it also happens to me that something fails quite long after upgrade so it was not obvious during the tests. Therefore I am staying at 6.18 and not going to upgrade so far as newer versions are still not reliable for me. Now testing 6.23 and carefully reading this forum and I am not convinced to move forward. There are still new errors introduced with each new update.

The software was tested before release in their own enviroment. Users should do the same before deploying. Mikrotik cannot be expected to know everybodies set up. You test, report any problem in the correct manner and all will be well. Only a fool would deploy without testing in their own environment I have said this before, if Mikrotik were to test every possible scenario we would never have any progress. You cannot compare ros to other software developing. Even a pc operating system has only a fraction of the end user scenarios of ros. Give them a break.

Some simple rules for the end user.

Question your motive for upgrading.

If it ain't broke don't fix it

If you need to upgrade test test and test, work with developer to correct any issues before final deployment.

Each new release HAS NOT BEEN TESTED IN YOUR ENVIROMENT and may not work as expected

karina, you are not right.
"....Only a fool would deploy without testing in their own environment..." - do you test windows or microsoft office after you installed it on your PC ??

It is not important in which environment the software runs, it must run stable in any environment! And Mikrotik must guarantee that a new version of RouterOS won't fall apart in client's environment! What is happening today is a total devastation! RouterOS has a lot of functionality but this functionality can be fully tested if Mikrotik would follow software development principles. They must have predefined standard test sets, which must be carefully designed, which should cover all features which are present in RouterOS. Of course there must be a lot of tests which will run probably many days, but this is a norm. I worked with large software systems where functional tests run for a few weeks in order to fully test the software. But it seems Mikrotik doesn't have predefined functional test which automatically run when they write the code. I bet they have 2-3 testers who manually test the software.

But really it is very strange why such a serious company as Mikrotik is not investing money and time in software testing. Being for so many years in this field they still don't understand that software testing is important as well software writing

karina, you are not right.
"....Only a fool would deploy without testing in their own environment..." - do you test windows or microsoft office after you installed it on your PC ??

It is not important in which environment the software runs, it must run stable in any environment! And Mikrotik must guarantee that a new version of RouterOS won't fall apart in client's environment! What is happening today is a total devastation! RouterOS has a lot of functionality but this functionality can be fully tested if Mikrotik would follow software development principles. They must have predefined standard test sets, which must be carefully designed, which should cover all features which are present in RouterOS. Of course there must be a lot of tests which will run probably many days, but this is a norm. I worked with large software systems where functional tests run for a few weeks in order to fully test the software. But it seems Mikrotik doesn't have predefined functional test which automatically run when they write the code. I bet they have 2-3 testers who manually test the software.

But really it is very strange why such a serious company as Mikrotik is not investing money and time in software testing. Being for so many years in this field they still don't understand that software testing is important as well software writing

Yes I do. a new os is fully tested before deploying. No sysadmin would deploy a new os release on his domain without fully testing in his environment. My previous statement still stands. Mikrotik could only guarantee stability if they were to test in your exact environment.

It would take an army and months of testing to try every hardware software combination. and believe me you would not be buying Cloud core routers for less than a 1000 bucks. you cannot have it all ways

I have 3 versions of ROS running at the moment as certain scenarios have not passed testing phase in some releases. This is not the fault of Mikrotik as they could not possibly know my individual set up . If I really needed the later versions in the areas that have failed then I would tell them in the proper manner and it would be resolved in time. I do not know of any OS developers who would listen to an individual issue and make a fix for them.

...No sysadmin would deploy a new os release on his domain without fully testing in his environment..."

- how do you suppose to test if your environment is running in production ? You have thousands of users and 10 of gigas in there and the env is a hybrid one with many devices from different vendors. The sysadmins tests their setup only one time when they build it. Mikrotik and other vendors must ensure the client, that new version of software IN NO CASE won't break backward compatibility. You can add new feature to the system but DO NOT EVEN THINK TO REMOVE SOMETHING !!! What Mikrotik does is exactly the opposite, I wrote a lot of scripts 2 years ago, and no one of them work on the current routerOS version

...Mikrotik could only guarantee stability if they were to test in your exact environment...

- this is ridiculous

...It would take an army and months of testing to try every hardware software combination...

- there is no need to test every possible combination between hardware and software in order to release a high quality software. Modern software development industry has more than enough tools to test the code in an reasonable amount of time.

...I have 3 versions of ROS running at the moment as certain scenarios have not passed testing phase in some releases. This is not the fault of Mikrotik as they could not possibly know my individual set up . If I really needed the later versions in the areas that have failed then I would tell them in the proper manner and it would be resolved in time. I do not know of any OS developers who would listen to an individual issue and make a fix for them...

- seriously ? How about IOS/IOS XR/etc software from Cisco, nowadays networking software can be updated even without taking out the device from service, without a single reboot ! and all setups/configuration which you had, work as they worked before.

I don't want to continue the discussion because this is a nonsense.

Obviously routeros is very flaky sometimes, but my experience with Cisco ios is frankly not much better.
Any real carrier tests that stuff intensively before deployment anyway.

You are right. On the other hand, what makes you to upgrade if your network works correctly?

The only reason I made the upgrade was the Mikrotik announcement of fixing one of UserManager problems (session reset ...inactivity).

And of course why you are upgrading without proper testing?

What you propose is to create an exact copy of my whole system just for testing purposes?
What if I have 200 pieces of equipment? Do I have to buy another 200 just to test?
This might be a good idea for Mikrotik's SalesDepartment, but this in not the way things work in IT.

I've been for years a software developer. The idea of launching a new release is to correct existing errors.
If launching new releases, repeatedly brings more errors, then you have a major problem.
If I was Mikrotik, I would stop immediately launching new releases until the problem is solved.
And I would invest more for testing, to regain the customer's trust and company's good name.