Re: [Hampshire] Software bugs & impending liability

Stephen Davies wrote:
> 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.
>
We deliver (very) expensive commercial software and always include lists
of outstanding issues in the Release Notes - it sometimes depends on the
customer receiving it, but such lists at a minimum contain bugs that
they may possibly come across, and in others *all* bugs are listed, even
in code they will never use.

Some customers ignore these lists - if the software does what it is
supposed to do in normal usage, then they don't mind if some edge
conditions don't behave perfectly. Others bicker on about the bugs
endlessly and usually too long (yes, they are usually the ones who want
to see *all* of the bugs).

In the commercial world, when dealing with relatively small numbers of
customers (10s rather than thousands or millions), having some bugs in
little-used code or with reasonable workarounds is preferable to not
getting the software for many months. The customers are few enough that
we have the time to support those workarounds and can talk to individual
customers to help them. If we had many more customers, the pressure
would be either to spend even more time getting it right (but late), or
keeping quiet about the bugs and hoping they didn't notice.

Simon