There is an interesting article on infoworld
http://infoworld.com/t/software-licensing/watch-out-developers-here-come-lawyers-436
about proposals to make developers liable for damages if they are caught
shipping software with bugs and not telling the user about them.
Oddly, Microsoft & 'The Linux foundation' are on the same side here.
As someone who has been writing software professionally since 1975 the
issue of releasing software with known problems (or items Fixed in Next
Release) has always concerned me.
At DEC, we used to document the 'known issues & limitations' in the
release notes. I don't see much of that in the FOSS world or even with
many of the hugely expensive commercial software packages I use of a
daily basis.
If you start with the premise that getting 100% bug free software is
hugely expensive then I think the sort of problem software developers
face on a daily basis are pretty obvious.
My estimates are that 90% bug free takes 10% of the time to get to
100%. The remaining 10% takes 90% of the time. That is where the
expense comes in.
Back in the 90's there was a lot of emphasis on programmes such as '6
sigma'. This grew out of the US Automotive industry and aimed to get
products delivered on time, on budget and with the slogans like 'Do it
once and do it right' & 'Do it right first time'. Ironically, this seems
to have fallen out of favour in the west at the moment but I get a lot
of the '6 Sigma' marketing speak from Indian Outsourcing Companies.
I don't think I'm alone in trying to ensure that everything I develop is
bug free but there comes a point where sometimes you have to say enough
is enough.
I'd be interested in how other LUG members would approach the following
situation.
In a Client Server DB system where the Database server is accessed over
a LAN, there are a number of different errors that can be reported by
the Client DB software when either there are problems with the LAN or
the Database server/system goes offline. In the case of SQL Server 2000
this is more than 20 different errors. Some are easily handled by a
retry but others are really fatal and should be handled as such. Coding
for all these possible conditions in every DB operation is SQL was a
real nightmare and actually made the code almost unmaintainable. I made
the case to the customer for 'Keep It Simple' and make every error a
Fatal one and be done with it. The bought into my suggestion so code
with some known bugs went into Production.
Did any of the errors come back to bite me? Well after 3+ years in
production (with 1 bug that was not down to a coding problem) I have to
say no they didn't.
I'm wondering how other LUG Members would tackle the release of software
with known bugs and would it stop you from developing software in the
future if you had the spectre of being sued for bugss in your software.
Remember that the Microsoft EULA makes them NOT Liable for any defect in
their Software although how that would ever standup to the scrutiny of a
court I'm not sure. Perhaps this is why they are on the same side as the
Linux Foundation.
Stephen D
