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I did find one more "enhancement" with the new website. Flight times have been adjusted again (I had a bunch change by a minute or so)...normally, this means calling SMS to get my seats updated again. However, everything is still in the system, even with the changed flights. Hopefully it will continue like this...one less call to SMS saves me about 5 minutes, which undoubtledly can be better used than by calling Delta.

However, many sites such as eTrade and Earthlink WebMail allow using the old and new interface at the same time until they get the bugs out of the new one.

Moving such a mission critical site overnight to a new interface without extensive realworld parallel testing is a huge, rookie, dot-com mistake.

-=tg=-

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I agree 100% with you tgtg, but not much changed on the DL website except some fonts and graphics, so maybe DL didn't think much testing was needed. Why would they bother changing the look of the website without improving functionality or fixing existing bugs? :confused:

Maybe it's a work in progress?

For a site with the profile of delta.com I most certainly would *not* expect that the pre-production would be trusted to the coders. Testing should be a distinct function and generally is in well run shops.

Their changes are more significant than is apparent. Somehow they broke the caching directives and they lost support for browsers that previously worked. There really is no excuse for a company Delta's size making such fundamental mistakes. I'm not exactly a big fan of the Mac platform these days, but there are enough Mac users around that breaking Safari support is dumb-assed in the extreme!

The website is still fully functional on Safari. IF you've got the latest edition and the latest OSX version.
I think the problem here is that website developers must figure that everybody has all the latest computer bells and whistles when exactly the opposite is true.

Well I based the comment on earlier posts complaining that the site was broken in Safari. As I'm not in an AF lounge at the moment I'm not using Safary myself! ;)

The coders shouldn't make any assumptions. The scope should define the *minimum* set of browsers to be supported and the coders should deliver that. If Delta decided to reduce the supported browsers by that extent then they are crazy. If they decided to break the caching directives then they are crazy. If the scope didn't cover these items then they are incompetent. If the scope covered the items but the coders didn't deliver them then the coders suck and the project manager sucks for not catching the problems during testing. What a great selection to choose from!

The reality of new software....
 

In house testing has inherent flaws and is why a beta program SHOULD happen before something goes live (but it appears Delta either didnt find this necessary or ending up so far behind in rollout they had to scrap it).

The big problems with in house testing is that the machines are usually new and "perfect" they have the right settings, the newest browsers and dont have all the bugs our real world machines do. So even if testing 75% of issues do not get caught (I spend my career helping firms implement databases and have learned this reality the hard way, which is why I now agree to beta test for some major software vendors, so by the time my clients get to the software it is more stable).

The problem may be that THEY had software with all the latest bells and whistles that they were programming in and it doesnt support older machines. On a MUCH smaller scale my partner runs into this all the time with AutoCAD. If his client has done a drawing in the newest version it may not have backward compatability to the older versions. Same happens with Adobe PDF all the time.

YES they should have looked into this, but doesnt appear they did.

Anyone notice that Airtran just updated their website too? Coincidence?

Make sure you are reporting this stuff
 

For those having problems, best way to get them noticed is make sure you are filling out the site feedback form....

http://www.delta.com/help/contact_us...back/index.jsp

I can agree to an extent, but IMHO beta volunteers also tend to have more up to date equipment than the "average" customer. That is why competent testing programs usually have a range of older equipment and browsers available to test web apps. Competent testing should also include defined bandwidth testing to ensure that the web app meets the max load times specified over lower bandwidth links. Of course somebody has to have specified maximum load times for a given bandwidth in the scope. Delta's site has never been good over GPRS but FT really sucks! ;)