ERA, Bugs, and Beta Testing

Well, guys, we did it! Five months after it was originally announced in a blog post, we finished ERA. It's been a great time making these plugins and we hope you'll enjoy using them.

However, we'd also like to take a moment and talk a bit about the development process for our plugins.

A huge part of getting our plugins to work is through beta testing. We are almost constantly pushing new betas of our current public projects in our server, and yet with the large amount of time that gets put into them, bugs still slip through the cracks, and some plugins in ERA have some nasty bugs which are needing to be retroactively fixed, causing inconvenience for anyone using features affected by the bugs.

We bring this up for a simple reason: The devs cannot find ways to break the plugins as easily as you can.

The devs know how to use the plugins. They know it top and bottom. However, the end user might use it in a slightly different way, and that is where a lot of bugs arise. Another case that happens a lot is a plugin working fine on the Dev's computer, but bugging out on other computers.

These are bugs which can only be discovered and fixed through beta testing and using the plugins betas in a real-world situation. Liz, the lead developer of 314Dragon, beta tested some ERA plugins by creating an entire project file using them. Now, we are not asking and never will ask you to put in the same dedication that we do, but what we would like to draw attention to is the importance of beta testing, and putting the plugin through some strain to scout for bugs.

A similar issue happened with CrossLaunch, where a critical bug in the plugin code was causing the plugin to bug out in some situations. This bug wasn't discovered until much after CrossLaunch had released and been used in projects, and it was a bug which would have likely been caught in beta testing.

So with all that being said, if you can find the time, and are willing to donate time to finding and reporting bugs to improve the plugins, then it would be greatly appreciated. All the resources you need are in our Discord server. Major contributors will receive a special role for helping improve the plugins.

With that being said, thank you for reading our little ramble here.

Cheers!

 - 314Dragon team