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Open Source Programmers Stink At Error Handling
Mark Cappel writes: "LinuxWorld columnist Nick Petreley has a few choice words for for the open source community in 'Open source programmers stink at error handling'. Do you think commercial software handles errors better?"
...is only as solid as the engineer behind it (and the design behind him/her). A poor design often results in a flaky system, difficult to implement and nearly impossible to predict. That, in turn, can result in very thin error handling. Whether or not a product is commercial has nothing to do with it. The only argument for that could possibly be that in many cases, more careful attention (in the form of testing and code reviews) is taken when a product is a revenue generator (or anything that will affect the perception of the quality of a company's engineering ability).
Ultimately, if the engineer (or team of engineers) is inexperienced, error-handling will be weak, error-recovery nearly non-existant. However, a more senior engineer will generally start from error handling on up, making sure the code is robust before diving too deeply into business logic. The time taken for unit testing plays an especially large role here. The more time spent trying to break the code (negative test cases) the more likely you will have a system that has been revised throughout development to have rock-solid error handling/reporting/recovery.
[McP]KAAOS
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