Speaking as one that wears all 3 hats, (not at the same time mind you, I would look rather silly), as a developer, the primary focus is to not create bugs when adding new features and certainly now when fixing features. Yes that can be easier said than done, especially as spaghetti code is often at the root cause of many bugs, and debuggers are critical tools needed to help find and fix things. But that is only part of the story, QA and users do unexpected things which developers should for tell and protect against. As a QA lead it is a challenge to break code other developers create, and sometimes its the role of the customer to find the really obscure issues. As a documenter the clarity of what gets written is as important as the accuracy of what is written. I say this after inheriting documentation from two predecessors who claimed to write good English and keep the changes made up to date, (yes that was a laugh). So to summarise, the whole lifecycle can be a real pain, we simply have to do the best we can with the resources to hand, unless anyone has a time machine or working crystal ball. Bobby Dazzler

I was fortunate to start with a C64 moving onto Amiga 500, 1200 where I first had a 40Mb hard drive. From there I was fortunate to work commercially with the Amiga 3000 for a few years and also I dabbled with the zx80, where myself and friend created some speech recognition using the tape port, it had a repertoire of 3 words only and with the memory expansion pack having a dodgy connection crashed often. My friend and I then linked this to the IO port and mains isolated switch to turn a light on and off using voice. It makes you wonder at the rapid progress at speech recognition in recent years. Daren

Well this may be almost a decade too late but in case anyone else is experiencing this problem, I found the solution by changing code optimisation settings from Max Speed to Default in the C++ tab of VC6.