Anatomy Of A Bug In Microsoft Office

bender writes "An insightful look at what it is like to track down and fix a bug in Microsoft Office is available from Microsoft's Blog site."

Comments

But...

[Joey Patterson]

I can already fix MS Office bugs by myself!

Re:But...

[dan_sdot]

Actually, I have to be honest and admit that Microsoft Office is a good product. Its stable, has alot of nice features and is intuitive to use.
I am not _at all_ a fan of M$, but we should be fair about this. Office is pretty solid.

Re:But...

[1010011010]

Uh, are you sure you're using MS-Office? Ever have any Bullet Madness? Sudden appearance of Times New Roman? Word saving files it can't later read back in (but OpenOffice can)? 1k HTML files processed into 100K HTML files by Word? Pasting text from one document into another and having the document's margins get reset? ... and that's just today!

Re:But...

[mandos]

I call BS on this. I've not been a fan of MS for years, but recently I had to write a business plan and due to decisions out of my control I had to do it in Word and Excel. I am quite good with both but have generally avoided using them since my previous job of training others to use them. After extensive use I can tell you that they are NOT better, people just are willing to put up with more shit from MS. If it's not from MS it has to be perfect, just to be considered. All MS's hand waving about being able to conviently put Excel charts and such in Word documents is BS. It can be done, but not with out a lot of effort to make it worthwhile. I prefer OpenOffice and am more then willing to admit it has issues. However, whenever I have to choose between the two, I'll take the latest version OpenOffice.

Bug Triage

[Anonymous Coward]

1. Does it affect Clippy? Fix immediately!
2. Does it affect features? Fix this week.
3. Does it affect security? Fix when you get around to it.

Re:Bug Triage

[dasmegabyte]

This should be marked +1, Insightful. You only think you're being funny. But when a bug affects every one of your installed customers -- such as a security bug or a major feature change -- you had better be damned sure that you fix it completely and that the fix does not break behavior that third parties have come to expect.

Take this Active X thing. Do you realize how many essential web components, many of them from companies that are now out of business, would stop working if ActiveX were turned off altogether? Many, many websites would stop working, and you can bet the people running them would blame Microsoft. Poor security doesn't cost you anywhere NEAR as much as losing ISVs would. So you spend a lot of time planning, reviewing and executing the patch, and equal time testing it.

But bugs in trivial features? Shit nobody uses or really cares about? You can fix that really quickly, because if the fix is still broken, it won't make much of a difference. You don't need a tiger team or testers working late hours. You can put a single intern on it and get it "done" in an hour.

It's a matter of caution, not priority. When the potential fix affects the core of your business, you move slower fixing it. You release work arounds while you're planning and testing. And you slowly roll out the repairs.

A as in "one"?

[StevenHenderson]

what it is like to track down and fix a bug

Track a bug? Sounds like trying to follow a single mosquito in the ranforest. :)

The key problem is expressed in very few words

[newandyh-r]

"And, always remember that I can't fix what I can't see. I have to be able to reproduce the problem while being able to run some kind of diagnostic tool. The key to fixing a bug is predictability. Without predictability, I can't fix it, because without predictability I have no way to understand how the complex interactions in modern software cause the specific problem to occur."

Re:The key problem is expressed in very few words

[mdf356]

Which is funny to hear, because (history: I work for IBM on the AIX kernel) I've fixed a lot of bugs I can't see, via code inspection and knowing roughly what was happening when the system crashed.

I'm sure Word has a milti-million line codebase. But so does AIX. It's split into different components, and there's quite a few bugs where I know roughly which code must have been running. So stare at the code for a few hours envisioning different inputs/control flows, and eventually a case that's not accounted for properly will show itself.

Bah. Amateurs.

Cheers, Matt

A bug at MS.

[Anonymous Coward]

27-08-2004 08:14

Several bugs have been sighted near the southern perimeter and some of our QA staff have been wounded in a couple of minor skirmishes. Strategic Command said the enemy's main move will not come for weeks and certainly not in this sector, though I am beginning to doubt.

27-08-2004 08:26

The skirmishes have intensified and several QA squads are trapped between an unknown number of bugs. We even had a few lightning strikes beyond our perimeter, which took out our BugTraq listening post. I tried to call in for assistence from StratCom, because I suspect the main strike is happening here as we speak. 27-08-2004 08:54

The minor skirmishes have ceased along all sectors. We are trying to evacuate the wounded and salvage what's left of some of our equipment. 3rd QA batallion took heavy losses, as did 6th QA and 8th Helpdesk. What is this, some cat and mouse game they are playing with us?

27-08-2004 09:06

All hell broke loose! While we were trying to evacuate the wounded, we found our sector under attack from multiple vectors, including artillery and naval support. Whatever remained of 3rd and 6th QA that was stationed in the rear has now been wiped out. 8th Helpdesk has been decimated and I had no other option to commit 24th, 12th and 2nd Developer batallion to the battle, at least untill reinforcements arrive. The enemy seems to be using a superior number of SFU-506 "Sasser" class fighters with ActiveX payloads. I nearly begged StratCom to send some "KB900364" SAM batteries.

27-08-2004 15:56

We have pulled back and regrouped in Sector 56. 3rd, 4th, 6th QA got decimated. 8th, 12th and 15th Helpdesk have been routed as well. 24th, 12th and 2nd Developer have been utterly destroyed to save the rest from annihilation. The few who remain are now en-route back home. Some are shell-shocked, one fat guy keeps jumping around yelling "Developers!"... Poor sod, this is war at it's worst.

Bugs cause Office bug...

[autophile]

It's not uncommon for users to make a few edits to a document, save the document, make a few more edits, save the document again, make a few more changes, and continue this process of edit/save for hours on end.

Gee, I wonder why.

--Rob

Gives an idea of the scope of the problem

[ribond]

I like seeing such a dedicated description of how bugs can remain.. This line:

"Why did it take so long to figure out what was up with this?" Well, you might as well ask why police departments continue to have a large number of unsolved crimes on the books. The issue is the same: the investigation stalls for the lack of any further leads to follow.

Describes a huge chunk of my life in Software QA. It's an example of what is great about MS software and what is awful:

Great: dedicated test resources to chase down corner cases/non-obvious scenarios, accountability for broken scenarios, etc
Awful: Iterations of releases built on legacy code means no one (or two, or three) people can understand the problem or scope the fix.

For all the complaints here about MS code I wonder that no one has noticed the Windows weakness that is not getting exploited..? If MS software is really as bad as everyone here makes out then why doesn't someone do it better? Blah blah Linux blah blah... Build software for Windows that people can use without rebuilding their systems. If you do it well enough tell them it's even better on Platform X.

Re:Just a thought

[ryane67]

have you ever actually released software into the wild?

I came across a bug in one of my active enterprise systems today that I had never seen before, and none of my 1500 users had reported it. It would have never been found had i not been just screwing around with random things.

Give the MS guys some credit here, they have a lot of things to go over with constantly looming deadlines. You can't test EVERYTHING.

Re:Complexity theory and chaos

[jafac]

You can blab and whine all you want about complexity. Then you gotta explain why, since Word 95, there's been an issue with Section Breaks spontaneously changing type, and causing page numbering problems.

Still exists in Word 2003.

Countless usenet posts exist describing the anguish of VBA programmers when they encounter this bug, classify the behavior, report it to Microsoft, find out it's been a known issue for over 9 years, with no plan to fix it.

That's not caused by complexity. That's caused by bad management. Folks with no conscience. No pride in their work.

Re:Why was that flagged "troll"?

[lspd]

Win95 was THE MOST ADVANCED OS in the world!

Win98 fixed all the bugs in Win95.

Win98SE fixed all the bugs in Win98.

WinME: The bugs strike back.

Re:Disagree

[krog]

Once you tie Word down, hold a knife to its throat and say "No. Really. I know what I'm doing -- back off," it's really quite good.

It's not an issue of bugs, it's an issue of features turned on by default. Unfortunately (as I said above), you need to call off the dogs in about 100 different places before Word becomes really good.