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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."
99% of the time it's because upper managment either promised the customers features that could not be implemented or gave the programmers too little time and/or resources to finish the job. While not software development, I am having to deal with a similar problem right now. We are moving our website to a new CMS system. So we have to move all of the content from our old pages to the new system using a slow, buggy, web based system. In the beginning we were told by IT that we had until June 5 to complete the move, so we scheduled our time accordingly. Things progressed slowly but in time to meet the deadline. Then Tuesday morning we get a call from the assholes in PR that we have to have everything done by this Friday. We just had our remaining time cut in less than half. There is no way we can get done, so the site will be incomplete. PR gets no blame and we look bad.
And if our IT staff had the same intelligence, competence, and vision as our management team, we'd kill over 10,000 people a week.
The Independent: Reverend Spooner Arrested in Friar Tuck Incident - ISIHAC, Historical Headlines