Re: "Infinite Defects"

[Pieter Nagel <pieter.nagel@epiuse.co.za>]

  On Mon, 17 Nov 1997, Luc-Etienne Brachotte wrote:
  
  >     "   The Opus project, later renamed Word for Windows, caused
  >      staffers to coin the now-famous phrase "infinite defects". This de-
  >      scribes a situation where testers are finding bugs faster than de-
  >      velopers can fix them, and each fix leads to yet another bug;
  
  This situation is not specific to Microsoft. It is a general problem
  in the software industry. There are various software engineering
  methodologies which aim to prevent this, but not one is genrally
  accepted as The Best.
  
  It is still, afaik, common for commercial software to be developed
  using *no* real methodology.
  
  Microsoft is under scrutiny, not because of their software
  engineering practices, or the quality of their software - but because
  their monopoly may lead the industry into a position where MS won't
  really need to do anything about improving their quality and
  engineering because there are no competitors who use better software
  engineering methodologies.
  
  > Which companies said it is easy to develop for Windows ?!!!
  
  Escalating bugs is inherent to large software, and you will find the
  same phenomenon in large Unix projects which are not properly
  engineered. I don't think the Windows platform per se is to blame for
  this.
  
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