The “Quality, Performance and Stability” Mantra

Over recent releases you might have picked up on the fact that Embarcadero keep listing the same feature in every release: “Quality, Performance and Stability”.

That’s nice, but it’s a little fluffy. What exactly does it mean? I know I’ve had customers tell me that RAD Studio 10 Seattle was much more stable than some earlier versions, but it still feels a bit vague to me.

So I thought I’d pull together the total fix lists for recent versions, to try and put a number on “Quality, Performance and Stability”. Note I’m talking about customer reported issues here. I’m excluding internal bug reports, even though some of those are logged on behalf of customers, because I want to rule out the bugs that were introduced and fixed during a single product cycle. I only want bugs that a paying customer has experienced. This probably means that these numbers are conservative, but to me that’s better than having them be over-inflated.

Here’s what I found:

XE7 : 329 (full list)

XE7 Update 1 : 41 (full list)

XE8 : 366 (full list)

XE8 Update 1 : 166 (full list)

10 Seattle : 331 (full list)

10 Seattle Update 1 : 79 (full list)

10.1 Berlin : 627 (full list)

A few quick take-aways from this:

• If you’re sitting on XE6, even apart from the new features, there are nearly 2000 customer reported bugs (plus however many internally reported bugs) that have been fixed in the later versions that you’re missing out on.
• Embarcadero’s bug fixing efforts seem to have picked up pace dramatically with this release.  10.1 Berlin has nearly double the number of fixes that came in 10 Seattle, XE8 or XE7. If you’re one of the folks who found Seattle a big improvement in stability, you should be very happy indeed with Berlin.