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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."
Careless mistakes and security holes? What about MS taking 200+ days to patch a critical security hole? What about bugs/security holes due to bad management styles/lazy programming or a combination of the two?
Sure, bugs / security things will happen... but how many are too many? And when is an acceptable time frame to fix those, and fix those that pose major security risks?
That is the biggest load of rubbish I have heared in my entire life. Software SHOULD NEVER BE SHIPPED WITH KNOWN BUGS. Sloppy development techniques, and over-ambitious per-release feature-lists are the only reason for extensive known buglists. From my perspective, hardware incompatibilities are the only reason to have a known buglist - but this should be related to hardware issues only - and not issues caused by the software itself. It is people like youself who give small, efficient development houses a bad name.
This guy gets it, and the others responding to this thread do not. There is no reason to ship with known bugs, shipping with known bugs doesn't mean you have good testing, it means you have lousy developers and poor quality.
The fact that consumers tolerate it means you have a good business model, or a good marketing team. But your still shipping crap and your developers (and managers and quality) still suck.
I think we should be careful to separate the bugs found in mulitple arch applications. I don't think it is either fair nor informative to classify a windows bug that affects FF running on windows as just a FF bug. It's a windows bug that happens to show up in a windows application. That's just a general example but I have seen such bugs reported here on slashdot and other places with something like "OMG teh FF got insecure code!LOL!" when it turns out it is only with the MS arch. In fact, we really should always separate them, FF should always be identified as WindowsFireFox or LinuxFireFox,etc just make it one big fast word. That's my *opinion*, but is has some basis in reality, yes? I am disappointed that Mofo didn't do this anyway during the big name shuffle, would have been much easier then to separate the projects, and they SHOULD BE separated completely, IMO.
I would be extremely happy if there was a browser product/project-taking web browsers as around the most used and critical application in common use-that was being seriously developed to ONLY run on open source operating systems and not Windows. I was going to be switching to Konq, now I find out there's a huge effort there to port KDE stuff to *&^^*(*(( windows, a further caving in and dilution of open source effort.
Not only does it detract from true adoption and not crutches and workarounds for MS bugs, but it is also rewarding in every sense of the word- MS and the users for the failure of MS to adequately address their own shortcomings, rewarding as in the sense that MS is still being paid by the billions of dollars and these open source projects that make MS operating systems functional and more secure just further enhance and embed and perpetuate the vendor lockin.
Despite claims to the contrary (and I know there must be hundreds of readers ready to jump on this with typing anger in their fingers) that MS users switching to some open source applications like FF or OOo will lead them to eventually using only open source operating systems, the proof is to the exact opposite, the "switch" figures-as accurate as they may be-are not showing this, it is basically flat and at the same level it was at several years ago now, just 2 per cent or so. I defy anyone to actually prove otherwise. Not allege, prove it.
In short, it is a big fat waste of time to work on open source as a non-paid MS stealth employee if your goal is to help people switch to an open OS.. If that isn't someone's goals, then it doesn't matter, I am just a little tired of seeing these claims when there is ZERO proof that this is happening or will happen. It is enabling, that is the proper term for it, the same as buying an alky a six pack, it just will not work to get them to quit and go sober, despite all the effort and altruism that might be involved, it just will not work.
And as to why buggy code get's shipped, that is extremely easy to answer, it is an answer most everyone here will fall into denial about, but it is true. Software still in year 2006 does not come with an enforceable by law minimum consumer warranty, and I sincerely hope *that* is addressed at the legislative level soon, as it is obvious that it will never be done voluntarily by the "industry".
All the other reasons are a sham smokescreen for the most part. Before we had tangible consumer items enforced by law warranties, "industry" claimed they couldn't do it, it would be "too hard" and "impossible", yet history has shown it IS possible to get defects down to such a low acceptable level-with the warranties- that manufacturers continue to "make money" handsomely.
You put a manufacturer under legally enforceable financial threat to perform, take the ultimate decision on what is "good enough to ship" away from marketing and the owners,make them know full well that crap will cost them a lot more than good or better quality, and they WILL come to their senses and let the engineers do their jobs *adequately*.