Every now and then I get a new automatic update. I usually just press install. Today I browsed the release notes for the Adium IM client update (below). There are six new features, denoted with a “*”. The rest (about 30 of them) are fixes, meaning something was broken. These guys must be too busy to proactively test Adium. Test Driven Development probably would not work for them 🙂

With the simplest of math, 5/6 of their effort is fixing things that are broken.

I really like Adium. It works fine for me. It’s just a shame that so much effort has to go into fixing something rather than building it correctly in the first place.

Version 1.3.3 (2/19/2009) SVN Revision: [25960]

Changes Since 1.3.2
Major changes
Fixed a crash when using XMPP gateways and removing contacts
Switched to the pidgin-facebook plugin for Facebook connectivity, which should resolve several issues with Facebook and improve the interaction between Adium and Safari when both are logged into Facebook.
* Automatically send messages to offline contact when offline messaging is supported rather than prompting to send now / send later (#11127)
Fixed updating the list of users in a groupchat in many situations (#183, #10727)
* Tweaked the behavior of standard contact list type-to-search (#11496)
Fixed ICQ aliases storage on the server (#9890)
Fixed problem of events being recorded with wrong contact (#10436)
Fixed visual glitch that made creating a SameTime account impossible in some localizations (#11675)
* Tab completion of names in groupchats is now case-insensitive
* Updated from libpurple 2.5.2 to 2.5.5mtn
Fixed several MSN problems introduced by WLM 9: icons not showing up (#11529, #11532), file transfers failing (#11396)
Fixed publishing of ICQ (available and away) status messages (#3085)
Fixed publishing of ICQ icons (#10597)
Fixed a crash when a Yahoo user messages an MSN contact (#11256)
Fixed a QQ hang/crash (#11290)
Fixed a Sametime crash on login (#11381)
Fixed display of Gadu-Gadu user icons (#4702)
Fixed “Unable to add user – Unknown error (205)” when connecting to MSN (#11126)
Fixed duplicated buddies on authorization (#7171)
SASL PLAIN or IQ Auth passwords are no more in debug logs
includes many, many more fixes, especially to MySpace and MSN
Chat Transcript fixes
Fixed a crash involving the log viewer (#11309)
Fixed a bug that caused Adium to leave log files open
Reimported all logs into Spotlight, since 10.5.6 fixed importing them (#8320)
Chat window fixes
Fixed scrolling to the bottom of the chat when it loads for certain message styles (#10541)
Fixed several message styles (#10921)
Fixed alignment of the message display after clicking an emoticon (#11602)
Fixed some internal bugs related to historical and notification messages (#10152, #10174)
Fixed Renkoo’s image-click handling and added proper image-click handling to Renkoo Naked (#11561)
Other minor bug fixes
Fixed setting XMPP status messages, AIM available, and Gadu-Gadu status messages which contain characters normally escaped in HTML (#11215)
Properly hide iTunes Now playing information when appropriate (#11585) (sounds like fix)
Fixed referencing chat windows from AppleScript (#11352)
Fixed a code signing error when launching Adium after not changing list layouts since pre-1.0
Fix unpaired external enclosure characters around strings to be linkified. (#11175)
Localization changes
* Added a Greek localization thanks to “evripidis” (#11350)
* Updated the German localization
* Updated the French localization (#11646)
* Updated the Russian localization (#11590, #11220)
* Updated the Slovenian localization