Would you eat here again?
Last week, a group of friends were going to get together for lunch. The restaurant, chosen before I was invited, happens to be one where I saw some insect life on my last visit. So I declined to join them. I didn’t bother to provide my reasons nor did I suggest another place.
Now this last visit was about 10 years ago. You might suggest that there should be a statute of limitations for these sort of things and that I am being totally unreasonable. I would agree with you.
But then what is the formula for calculating the time? Does it matter if it was a single critter or multiple? Are mammals different than insects? Does the ownership of the restaurant matter? Does the cuisine matter? How about the restaurant next door? How about other establishments in the same chain? Does it matter if it occurred during your first visit to the establishment or if you had been a long time patron? Does it make a difference if it occurred before you had ordered the food or as you were paying the bill? Would it matter if you were there alone or if you were there on a date? How about if it occurred on a special and memorable occasion, say Mom’s 50th birthday? And where were the health inspectors? Did you report the sighting to the waiter? To the health department?
Given the alternatives, I am willing and able to go elsewhere.
So how does this relate to software development?
- How would you feel about discovering a bug in the development tools that you use? Would it be more worrisome if it was the compiler or if it was the debugger? How about in the third party libraries that you are using?
- Are bugs encountered during installation more worrisome than bugs encountered during an uninstallation process?
- Does a defect in one piece of software influence your opinion of the likelihood of a defect in another piece of software with similar functionality, say a defect in one compiler is likely to appear in another compiler? a piece of software from the same company?
- Do you know what software uses the same underlying code?
- Do you know what code was written by the same people?
- Do you know what code was written with the same processes?
- Do your customers have different reactions to defects?
- Do you expect software to have certain “defect density”? If testing uncovers an abnormally large number of defects, do you congratulate the testing organization?
- Do you report defects to other engineers? to other teams? to other organizations? to other companies?
- Do you believe customers report all the defects that they encounter in using your software?
I think the question of cuisine is relevant. I know of folks who, on finding one bug in an MS product will declare it a validation of all the failings of MS, but will pass over one in (say) OpenOffice without a pause.
As for me, when it comes to restaurants, as long as it isn’t in my food, I don’t mind much.
I like the idea of being able to screen out all software that Jo Smith ever touched.
柏大衛
February 17, 2010 at 5:41 pm