Software life cycle

[Jari-Matti Mäkelä]

BCS wrote:
> Dave wrote:
>> Walter Bright wrote:
>>
>>> Shamelessly cribbed from slashdot:
>>>
>>> 1. Programmer produces code he believes is bug-free.
>>> 2. Product is tested. 20 bugs are found.
>>> 3. Programmer fixes 10 of the bugs and explains to the testing
>>> department that the other 10 aren't really bugs.
>>> 4. Testing department finds that five of the fixes didn't work and
>>> discovers 15 new bugs.
>>> 5. See 3.
>>> 6. See 4.
>>> 7. See 5.
>>> 8. See 6.
>>> 9. See 7.
>>> 10. See 8.
>>> 11. Due to marketing pressure and an extremely pre-mature product
>>> announcement based on over-optimistic programming schedule, the
>>> product is released.
>>> 12. Users find 137 new bugs.
>>> 13. Original programmer, having cashed his royalty check, is nowhere
>>> to be found.
>>> 14. Newly-assembled programming team fixes almost all of the 137
>>> bugs, but introduce 456 new ones.
>>> 15. Original programmer sends underpaid testing department a postcard
>>> from Fiji. Entire testing department quits.
>>> 16. Company is bought in a hostile takeover by competitor using
>>> profits from their latest release, which had 783 bugs.
>>> 17. New CEO is brought in by board of directors. He hires programmer
>>> to redo program from scratch.
>>> 18. Programmer produces code he believes is bug-free.
>>> 19. See step 2
>>
>>
>> No way!! That's not 'real world' at all (it's too "Pollyannaish" -
>> things are really worse)! <g>
> 
> yah, you droped a few zeros on all of the bug counts.

Maybe this was just a tiny framework for hello world programs. :) I
wonder what happens to all those (lucky) original programmers. Do they
start as CEO's in some smaller companies like DigitalMars? Sorry Walter,
just joking - everybody knows you're the god. ;)

You know, these M$ bugs really annoy me. This year I have only used
their products for ~10 hours. Last week I was going to add an extended
partition to a friend's machine using the WinXP computer management
tool. Surprise surprise, it managed to wipe out all existing extended
partitions with id 0x83 (linux partitions). Luckily I was able to
restore the partition table using an utility called testdisk
(http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk).

-- 
Jari-Matti