PROGRAMS for REFRIGERATION and AIR CONDITIONING PROFESSIONALS by MISTRAL.


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Mistakes happen! Anyone pretending they don't make any is only deluding themself.

Mistral is a highly professional organisation, employing dedicated, very skilled and specially trained staff. Despite rigorous systems and checks, occasionally (very occasionally!) something goes wrong. A dimension on a drawing is incorrectly entered or more seriously perhaps, an operating temperature range limit for a cooler might be wrong. It simply isn't possible when processing literally hundreds of millions of individual items of information every year for someone, somewhere (*not necessarily within Mistral's organisation of course!) to hit the wrong key and for that error to not be immediately spotted.

* Interstingly, in Mistral's more than third of a century history of processing, formatting, entering, compiling and testing other organisation's data, our engineers have never yet received such information which could be considered totally error free. A sobering thought!

What is important is what we do about it when we discover and correct such errors and more on that below. What is equally as important is that you, as a rightfully trusting software user, also employ safeguards in your own organisation to guard against the consequences of someone else's errors! Good engineering software is an aid to good engineering practice and not a substitute for it! If you have won a contract through using Mistral software then you nonetheless still have an obligation to your customer to make a final manual check of results and equipment selections before spending their money!

What does Mistral do when it discovers an error in any of its programs?

Category 1. Critical. Serious error requiring software recall and re-issue. All registered licencees contacted.

Category 2. Embarrassing. Not potentially damaging commercially but will be reported on Mistral's website.

Category 3. Not serious. Will not be reported, at least not urgently, but will be corrected at earliest opportunity for all future issues.

Firstly, we refer to a prescribed action plan. This is to determine the severity of the error and to do this we must make some judgements. For example: Is the error potentially seriously commercially damaging if someone acted on data or results produced by the program and due to ineffectiveness of their own quality procedures, didn't spot it? If the answer is "Yes" then Mistral considers that to be a Category 1 error and instigates a prescribed procedure for not only researching and instigating an urgent correction but also to contact all known users. Both to advise them and also to replace their software. So far in Mistral's more than thirty year history a Category 1 error procedure has never had to be instigated.

For the next two levels of Category 2 (embarrassing but not damaging, Eg. A cumulative result more than 2.5% different to what could be achieved with the same information but using established manual calculation methods) then the correction is made at the earliest opportunity and applied to all future system releases. Finally, for a Category 3 error, Eg a printing column indentation or alignment problem discovered when Mistral software is being operated with certain new printer drivers, then it is scheduled for investigation and possible correction if practical to do so.

Where it is practical for licensees to update their own Mistral software installations and to correct Category 2 or Category 3 errors that have been resolved since their software issue was released, then Mistral provides a 'patch' download facility. Please click on the link below to see whether there are any current addendum patches that might improve or correct identified 'bugs' and errors in your Mistral installation.

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