Of Bugs and Guilt Trips
As someone whose life revolves increasingly around bugs, I simply couldn’t resist calling attention to two excellent weblog posts on the subject of software quality and the public’s perception of it.
The first, which I discovered via Andrej Budja (who really is doing a great job as a Longhorn blogger—I recommend his site), was written by Joe Bork, a software tester at Microsoft. In his thorough post-mortem on a particular Visual Studio bug, he answers a question that, in my experience, perplexes and outrages a lot of people: Why do software companies seem to ship software with known bugs? One answer, as Bork explains: more or less all software has bugs, and bug fixes, even seemingly small ones, always have a certain level of risk associated with them given a particular time frame.
The second link is David Hyatt’s amusing post on the “guilt trip” tactics used by some bug filers to shame developers into fixing their pet issues (Brent Simmons also made a similar post). The problem with these kinds of people is that they really need to read Joe Bork’s post and understand that decisions about fixes are not usually based simply on how guilty someone feels about a problem.
If you really want to ensure that your bugs (whether they are in a favorite shareware app or OS X) get fixed in a timely fashion, there is one thing you can do: make sure your report gives the developer enough information to reproduce the problem! Don’t just describe the symptoms—provide some context! Wrack your brain to think of what you were doing when the problem happened, the precise path you took to see the the behavior, any unusual software you might have been running at the time, new hardware you might have added, etc. If applicable provide a sample (e.g. a page that Safari chokes on or a file that causes Word to crash). And, as any developer reading this will attest, be sure to include a crash log if at all possible—they are often absolutely indispensable in tracking down a problem!