The Economics of Perfect Software 201
Posted
by
Soulskill
from the done-versus-done-ish dept.
from the done-versus-done-ish dept.
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."
Re:Wrong name (Score:3, Funny)
{
printf("Hello, world");
return 0;
}
I demand your first born.
Re:Wrong name (Score:5, Funny)
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 (Score:5, Funny)
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 (Score:5, Funny)
Re:probably good idea; definitely bad example (Score:5, Funny)
then you replied:
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? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Oh Please (Score:3, Funny)
I'm breeding cockroaches to write code. How ironic: bugs will solve bugs.