Slashdot Mirror
Why Buggy Software Gets Shipped
astonishedelf writes to mention an article in the Guardian about the hard reality of why buggy code is sold on retail shelves. From the article: "The world's six billion people can be divided into two groups: group one, who know why every good software company ships products with known bugs; and group two, who don't. Those in group 1 tend to forget what life was like before our youthful optimism was spoiled by reality. Sometimes we encounter a person in group two, a new hire on the team or a customer, who is shocked that any software company would ship a product before every last bug is fixed. Every time Microsoft releases a version of Windows, stories are written about how the open bug count is a five-digit number. People in group two find that interesting. But if you are a software developer, you need to get into group one, where I am."
Software will stop being buggy as soon as people stop putting up with it.
If people actually stopped buying Windows because it sucks, you can bet your sweet darned bippie Microsoft would stop making it suck. As it is, honestly, why should they care? People keep using Windows. It makes no business sense for them to focus on quality if quality doesn't sell.
<flamebait>There is already a company that caters to the niche market that actually gives a rat's ass about consumer software quality. It's Apple -- and oh, look at how they just dominate the desktop computer market....</flamebait>
compiler error: $DEITY is just pretend.
There are 0x40000000 types of people: those who understand 32-bit IEEE 754 floating point, and those who don't.
...there's a huge difference between a bug and an enhancement request. I don't care if I'm the only frigging one that's triggered that bug, I get quite pissed when your tool isn't working and the crap I get back from support doesn't contain even a workaround only "This is a confirmed/known bug, blehbelbhe" then put me on hold till 2010. That your development team isn't going to implement a feature at my whim is something quite different, not to mention doing the same "analysis" makes no sense.
Key points for an enhancement request include such things as "Is it part of the direction where we want to take the product (strategic value)?". Sometimes there are hard calls on the path you want to take, and sometimes you want to take them even if the stepping stone doesn't justify it alone. Sometimes it's "the big picture" that needs work and it makes no sense to implement this little feature because we want to replace what it runs on top of. There are so many things like that which don't go into account when fixing bugs.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
we're talking about CORRECTNESS you dolt
If you cannot keep politics out of your moderation remove yourself from the Mod Lottery.. NOW!
no correctness in this context is not "will work in a user's real environment on his or her real hardware in a real world" and i haven't any clue where you pulled that out of your ass
did you get that from your high school microsoft word class teacher?
correctness in this context is ALGORITHM CORRECTNESS
ffs you're dense!
If you cannot keep politics out of your moderation remove yourself from the Mod Lottery.. NOW!