For the record, ESPN still has at least two problems

...with its fantasy baseball, which I just stumbled upon tonight.

I will label these bugs "A" and "2", and supplement them with bad-design-decision "iii".

A) I can move players around on my roster (make them active/inactive or change position slots), no problem. But when I go to add a new player from free agency, and it brings up the screen asking me to drop a player to make room, the players are back in their old slots, as if I hadn't made the changes. When I select a player to drop and submit the changes, the players I had moved for tomorrow are back in their old slots, and I have to move them again.

2) When I go to add a player from free agency, the screen that pops up asking me to drop a player to make room for him lists all my current players with a checkbox besides each. This would ordinarily not pose a problem, except that the particular move I need to make requires moving my current players around. I have three starting pitchers who are injured and eligible for the DL (disabled list) slot, a bonus slot in addition to your active players that allows you to replace an injured player without having to drop him. To add the free agent I want, I need to be able to drop the pitcher on the DL (Josh Johnson) to waivers, and move another injured pitcher (Chris Carpenter) to that slot. I can check the checkbox besides Josh Johnson's name and click Submit, but the transaction can't be completed because the system tries to add the new player to my non-DL roster, and there isn't any room.

iii) Making the "drop a player" screen based on check boxes is a poor design decision, exactly because of this type of scenario. In previous versions of the game, this screen instead gave you a pull-down list beside each player on your roster, allowing you to drop players OR move them around in various slots to make room for the new guy. The new design takes away this functionality and adds a step to add-drop operations, which is bad.

By themselves, these aren't serious bugs, because I could work around both of them separately. If the roster changes I made got undone by adding a player, I can re-do the changes. If a player I want to drop is on the DL, I can first swap him with another injured player, then check his checkbox on the drop screen and pick up my new player.

But put together, they create a synergy of badness that is impossible to work around. Even if I swap Josh Johnson with Chris Carpenter on the DL, those changes aren't reflected on the drop-a-player checkbox screen, because of bug A. After the swap, Johnson appears back in the DL slot on the drop screen, meaning I can't drop him because of bug 2 (and indirectly because of poor-design-decision iii.) There is literally no way to add the starting pitcher I need.

Wow. Those are problems I managed to stumble on in about 30 minutes, doing fairly standard roster maintenance. It's becoming more and more obvious that the testing on ESPN's Fantasy Baseball was either ignored, non-existent, or completely misguided. There's an important lesson to be learned from all this; good software testing is very important. Do not ignore it, even with your pretty, postmodern Web 2.0 apps.