Author: Bruce Moreland
Date: 19:27:32 05/28/01
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On May 28, 2001 at 08:13:11, David Rasmussen wrote: >On May 28, 2001 at 02:51:23, ERIQ wrote: > >>When some day soon we all wakeup and look around and all we see is one interface >>then I'm going to say "I told you so". >> >>look What happened the last time a company became a big monopoly IE. microsuck. >>Now we are all slaves to their software IE all good chess programs are written >>now for windows. >> >> And microsuck hasn't even produced a bug free product yet straight out of the >>box. > >Who has? > >>It always takes two versions,that we must pay for before it works well and >>by that time they have another dud program for sell. When will we learn. > >When will you learn? Microsoft had a very good model for producing bug-free code, but they weren't very good about implementing it company-wide and keeping to it. There was a meeting in the early 90's or late 80's or whatever, and out of this came something called the "Zero-Defect Coding Guidelines". I read this document and became and advocate for it, and one reason I no longer work there is I became frustrated by the failure of this document to penetrate the culture completely. I once announced in a meeting that every bug was a flaw in its programmer's character. My boss didn't buy this. He got a good laugh out of it, in fact. But I really believe this. If you get a bug, it's a personal failing. Another reason I left is that in the group I was in, you were evaluated in part by how many bugs you fixed. Most people spent a lot of time fixing their own bugs, so of course the bug database showed them as fixing a lot. Since I didn't have any bugs to fix, I ended up fixing other people's bugs, and that is something I find more odious than just about anything. It's also contrary to the Zero-Defect guidelines mentioned above. So on my evaluation one year, it said I didn't fix a lot of bugs. I went berserk at my boss, so he changed it to, "Bruce doesn't fix a lot of bugs, but to be fair, he doesn't create a lot either." So I at least got some back-hand praise for doing the most important thing a programmer can do -- writing code that works. The tester who worked on my stuff also had problems, because he didn't find any bugs. One of the things mentioned in that document is that the wrong people end up writing code. People who get a lot of bugs should spend their time fixing them, and people who don't get a lot should write code. One of the reasons I enjoy working on Ferret is that I can do it the way I want to. It does not crash, and it's always ready to go. I am very sad to see that Excel has become kind of buggy. That was the one product I know of that really tried to stick to the Zero-Defect guidelines. Recalc or Die. bruce
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