Alpha 10 and alpha 11: Fixing crashing bugs

Alpha 10 (released a couple of days ago) and alpha 11 fix a couple of bugs that caused the XL Toolbox add-in to crash.

Some changes that I had made to the code that asks users for file names and folders (e.g. during graphic export or when downloading an update) introduced subtle new bugs that crashed the add-in.

Unfortunately, this affects the ability to auto-update from alpha 9.

For users, these bugs may not seem so ‘subtle’.

For me as a developer, they are ‘subtle’ because they were not caught by the automatic testing system. The XL Toolbox uses ‘unit tests’ as a quality control – this is an integral part of modern software development.

However, unit tests do not test the interaction with the user. They just test small units of code. If I had ‘interaction’ (or integration) tests, I would have discovered these bugs before I released alpha 10 and alpha 11 to the public.

Unfortunately, I don’t know how best to test the interaction of the software with the user. I guess I’ll have to learn how to do it.