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."

Comments

Re:Welcome to Group One

[exp(pi*sqrt(163))]

Theoretically, there is no language that is more or less prone to bugs than any other language as understood in Turing Completeness

Frankly, this is complete garbage. Try writing an application in the Turing complete language Brainfuck or 6502 assembler and compare that with writing in the Turing complete language Haskell. Turing completeness is completely irrelevant and you're simply quoting CS 101 to give your comments an air of authority.

Re:Buggy code is sold because it is demanded

[drooling-dog]

I'm surprised I had to read so far down to find this, the real reason. Stuff gets shipped because somebody needs to make their numbers, now. Sometimes the survival of the company is at stake, and sometimes it's just an individual climbing the career ladder.

In a previous life I was in charge of software development for a smallish company whose business was scientific software and systems. To my repeated horror, the CEO and the Sales & Marketing VP would get together and decree - perhaps for reasons that were very compelling to them - that major software packages would be released to customers with no testing whatsoever. Stuff went straight from the compiler to the customer, sometimes even without a cursory walkthrough of functionality. For objecting, we, the software people, were branded as troublemakers and criticized for not being "team players". Once labeled in that way, I would be pretty much ignored any time I had to report that a new product or an update was not ready to ship. Needless to say, I left that company in a hail of bullets.

To this day, I still laugh when I hear people say that Open Source software can never measure up to "commercial standards". Depends on whose commercial standards you're talking about...