The Economics of Perfect Software

An anonymous reader writes "This article takes the interesting perspective that leaving bugs in software is good — little ones, at least. This quote is particularly insightful: 'How do you know whether a bug is big or little? Think about who's going to hit it, and how mad they'll be when they do. If a user who goes through three levels of menus, opens an advanced configuration window, checks three checkboxes, and hits the 'A' key gets a weird error message for his trouble, that's a little bug. It's buried deep, and when the user hits it, he says 'huh,' clicks a button, and then goes on his merry way. If your program crashes on launch for a common setup, though, that's a big bug. Lots of people will hit it, and they will all be pissed. ... The cost of fixing all the bugs in your program and then being sure you fixed them all is way too high compared to the cost of having a few users hit some bugs they won't care about."

Comments

Re:Wrong name

[betterunixthanunix]

int main()
{
printf("Hello, world");
return 0;
}

I demand your first born.

Re:Wrong name

[The Clockwork Troll]

You didn't include stdio.h and you probably wanted a \n at the end of your output string.

First born denied.

Re:probably good idea; definitely bad example

[WrongSizeGlass]

The only way of eliminating those dark corners is by eliminating them.

And today's Yogi Berra award goes to hedwards. We'd like to thank everyone who participated for participating and the winner for winning.

Re:Wrong name

[betterunixthanunix]

In C you can implicitly declare functions! I demand at least half of your firstborn.

Re:probably good idea; definitely bad example

[pem]

When I wrote:

When I'm trying very hard to make a program do what I want it to, the more hoops I have to jump through for every iteration of trying to make it work, the madder I get.

then you replied:

You must be a Windows user or haven't updated to an Apple OS past the old world Macs.

I have been racking my brain for the last half hour, trying to figure out what I wrote that bothered you so much that you felt compelled to resort to this sort of name-calling, but I can't figure it out, so expect a communication from my lawyer demanding compensation for this terrible libel you have committed about my computing practices in front of the entire slashdot community.

Re:How is this news?

[siride]

Then I would say that's a big bug, so it should be fixed.

Re:Oh Please

[Tablizer]

The reason that every piece of software ships with bugs is because:...It's created by people...

I'm breeding cockroaches to write code. How ironic: bugs will solve bugs.