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."
Anyway, I do agree with the author for the most part (its all pretty 101 risk assessment stuff). It is inevitable that software will have bugs in it (especially commercial software shipped to a schedule). This is not really news tho'.
What I would like to see is some vendor honesty. How about making a list of known bugs available to your customer prior to purchase? (I know, I know, fairly warning a customer is madness, etc etc).
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
And do we really need that much whitespace on a news page? I know about that whole '10 words per line' usability mantra, but it looks fucking ridiculous. Why can't all the other website owners just think exactly like me?
Wow, look at all that rebuking. Do I win Slashdot?
(IAJAFSS (I Am Just Another Fucking Smartass Student))
The argument about the enormous bug count in Windows isn't really about every last bug being fixed. The article fails to address a separate question: whether you're allowing the public to do your beta testing for you.
The idea of QC/testing/beta/whatever the heck you want to call it is that you get as many bugs as you can fix while accepting the ones that will remain behind. That's absolutely correct. However, there are companies - like Microsoft - that are notorious for either being sloppy and not getting bugs they should have, or just straight up not caring at all and rushing a product to market that legitimately shouldn't be there.
The argument can even be extended to good coding practices, like worrying about security fron start to finish rather than after you've entered beta (another well known Microsoft flaw, though they're getting better at it). That reduces the number of bugs to begin with, which in turn gives a better product.
ACs are modded -6. I don't read you, I don't mod you, I don't see you. Don't like it? Don't be a coward.
Regardless of the nature of the software development team, the nature of competition remains the same.
Stagnation is costly - delaying a product launch drives people to the alternatives (both due to the alternatives updating faster, and due to the lack of progress seen by the outside world).
Of course, buggy software is costly in terms of reputation, as well, so the end question becomes at what point will the delaying of the release cost us more market share then the remaining bugs will.
Unfortunate from a purists eyes, but it's just the way things go.
Because, by and large, no one gets killed when commercial software crashes.
In those cases where it does; e.g. medical/aviation software, usually embedded people take the time. If aviation software designers cut the same corners (w.r.t. bugs vs. features) that office software designers do, planes would fall out of the air and people would die. So they write well engineered software, in well engineered, fault tolerant languages (lika Ada). (Yes, yes, Ariane, but thats the exception that proves the rule)
The real reason buggy software is shipped, is because buggy software is accepted by the market, and people will keep buying it, and continue to roll their eyes when it crashes, because they're completely inured to it, and many of them have reached the conclusion that its literally impossible to write robust, stable software.
It's not, but the profit margins are narrow, and no-one seems to mind (or rather they mind, but keep forking over their money anyway). So no-one bothers to.
Face if folks, we're enablers.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
The article was about why known bugs ("thousands of bugs") aren't fixed before ship, not why all bugs aren't found.
With great power comes great fan noise.
Look at Vista. Everyone is complaining about it not shipping on time. I have yet to hear anyone say. It is a good thing that Microsoft is fixing all those bugs.
Product ships late because of bug fixes. Why is it taking so long.
Product ships on time with bugs. Why didn't you fix the bugs before shipping.
You just can't win
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Now, as to why bugs don't get quashed quickly:
I see each of these every day!
Logic is the beginning of reason, not the end of it.
That's foolish. There are bugs in every project of every size. Including bridges. And skyscrapers. Remember the Tacoma Narrows Bridge?
Normally, those bugs have low Severity or Frequency (or both). Sometimes they have catastrophic severity.
Did you know that the twin towers were built to withstand a direct impact from a 707?
Bugs are a fact of life. They follow from the mantra 'nothing is perfect.'
I currently have no clever signature witicism to add here.
No dude, you're wrong. I suppose you can believe that with sufficient abstraction, you're right, but you're not. All that formal systems theory and Turing business is great talking about abstract systems running abstract algorithms, but such discussions have zero to say about anything having to do with HUMAN error, which is what we're talking about here.
I've probably spent about equal time writing C and writing in higher level languages, and I can promise that I make fewer errors in higher level languages, doing equal tasks. I think anyone with a lot of code under their belts can make similar statements. The closer to the machine a language makes you work, the harder it is to keep higher level details in the back of your head. In a high-level language, you're much less likely to make a low-level error (and any you make will almost certainly be caught by a warnings mode on the compiler, and this leaves you to keep more of your neurons working on, for instance, keeping your database and its wrapper classes working together correctly -- a task that is, perhaps, a simple afternoon's work in Python, Perl, Ruby etc. two days in C# or Java, and a week of hair-pulling in C... and well... I doubt such a thing has ever been done in assembler.
Anyway, drop the semantic B.S. this is a debate about practicalities.
In Capitalist America, bank robs you!
Why do you dismiss a complaint which speaks to the very heart of the problem? A large class of bugs simply would not exist were a different language used. This is not pie in the sky stuff; it's a real phenomenon.
If one language is less error-prone than another, then an application written in that language will have less bugs.
If an error-prone language is being used to write software, then this surely has to be a reason why buggy software gets shipped. Why are you dismissing people who complain about error-prone languages?
Be true and faithful like your dog; but don't eat vomit like your dog