There have been a number of items on the ol’ information superhighway over the past week dealing with software quality.
First, once Visual Studio 2005 officially shipped on Monday, a number of high-profile .NET bloggers (Wesner, Frans, Roy) posted about bugs that they experienced with the RTM version. Mini-Microsoft summed it up in a couple of posts (here and here). There was this hint of outrage on a number of blogs that Microsoft would ship software with bugs; many claimed that VS 2005 was a piece of crap: There were some great counter-arguments from Paul Vick and Wesner. They’re right: it’s not crap, but it ain’t perfect.
Then Wired posted an article of the top ten worst software bugs in history. Scott Berkun had a great point on his blog about that: they’re the worst, not because of the errors, but because of the field for which the software was written (i.e. nuclear power plants versus your mp3 player.
I don’t know if Mr Sink wrote his latest article with all of the above in mind, but it’s certainly relevant. He talks about shipping with bugs. Eric, like Joel Spolsky, is a great writer who is able to say exactly what you’re thinking but in a way you’d never be able to. You can only exclaim “Yes! That’s totally it,” then get everyone you know to read it. So that’s what I’m doing.
Go read it: My Life as a Code Economist.
In my opinion, it *is* crap. I’ve been working intensively with all versions of VS.NET and this is definitely the worst one. The others had their issue but with VS2005, working just sucks because the IDE is a pain in the a***. It crashes often, sometime freezes so bad that only a reboot helps and above all – it’s just painfully slow.
I was really looking forward to the RTM version – and it’s just one huge disappointment 🙁
Just my 0.02$