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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."
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.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
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.
"How about making a list of known bugs available to your customer prior to purchase?"
There are several reasons not to do this. Not the least of which is simply that most customers don't want to know what's going on inside the application. They want to click "Button A" and have "Box X" pop up and start flashing - or whatever. They don't know that 300 lines of code went into making that happen and they're fine with not knowing that. They certainly don't want to be forced to actually understand what each of those 300 lines of code are doing. Try to explain it to them and watch their eyes glaze over in a hurry. You can try to simplify the explanation for them, but it'll never be enough because they can't grasp the problem without understanding what goes in to making it work; a necessity in understanding why it doesn't.
The point is that when you get into listing bugs, you have a number of caveats. First of all, in their eyes, you're telling them that the application you're selling them is broken. Sure, those bugs may never actually affect them. They may even be in parts of the code that aren't even used yet because it's part of a feature not currectly activated. But hey, you're selling them a broken program. Remember the Pentium floating point fiasco Intel had to suffer through? What was wrong with their processor? Nothing that isn't wrong with anything ever manufaturered: minor defects that rarely or never manifest under normal operating conditions. What happened when the news got out about the floating point bug that didn't affect more than a hundreth of a percent of buyers - if that? The 'public' went ballistic about it and Intel was eventually forced to do a recall of CPUs that were perfectly functional. Nevermind the fact that AMD and Intel routinely publish a long (and growing) list of 'errata' for their processors that are chock full of bugs. The moment the public got news of a single errata (which, again, didn't even affect them), they demanded replacement "working" products. Are you, as a company, going to expose yourself to that kind of liability?
Basically, the customer doesn't understand the inner workings of your application, doesn't want to understand the inner workings of your application, and if you try to make them understand anyway, bad things will likely happen to you. People can handle unexpected behaviors (bugs) when they're discovered and a promise is made to make it right (patch, updates, etc). But if/when they get wind that you knew the bug was there, and that there were others? That's a receipe for disaster.
What geeks/coders need to understand is that we make up a vastly small minority of software users. Unless and until a vendor is selling products to, and only to those who are informed, knowledgable, and intelligent about computer code, you will never see a list of known bugs right on the box. If it's there at all, it'll be made as obscure as possible so that your average Joe can't find it. Why? Because average Joe will go nuts regardless of how inconsequential the bug is, or how much it would push back the release of the product to stamp out all the (known) bugs.
Personally, I don't blame developers and vendors one bit for obscuring the known problems. When I run into a bug in something like MySQL or PHP, I can find out about it, whereas slightly-above-average Joe (beginner PHP page creator) would have a heck of a time. I find that to be ideal, as I can find the information I need and Joe's not taking up the vendor/developer's valuable time whining about 10,000 bugs he'll never see in his life.
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
Think of it this way:
At least that Nigerian scammer doesn't have your address anymore...
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Sigh... If only. Modding would be so much more fun.