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> Bugs are bugs and inevitable; at the end of the day, to ship quality software you have to test it No. Testing can never ever hope to give you bug-free produc
by virgilp 9y ago
> Bugs are bugs and inevitable; at the end of the day, to ship quality software you have to test it
No. Testing can never ever hope to give you bug-free products.... coding discipline and relentless pursuit of simplicity in design can.
The question is not why the testers didn't catch the "root with no password" bug - the question is really how it was possible to have it, in the first place.
- dilap 9y agoI disagree. Coding discipline and relentless pursuit of simplicity are great things, but there's no amount of discipline or simplicity that is going to save you completely from bugs. You've got to test. Even mathematical proofs are often found to have errors; even formal methods will have errors in the specification.
- virgilp 9y agoI don't say testing is useless, but it's highly unlikely that Apple doesn't test at all. From a point on, extra testing won't help you. I kinda doubt that the main problem here was "not enough testing"
- dilap 9y agoI'm sure they test some, & you might well be right, but to me, from the outside, it mostly seems like a failure to test thoroughly that's their main problem. E.g., the root-login-bug slipping back in is inexcusable. That bug should've entered in a "make sure this doesn't" regress list and be tested every release. Yet, it wasn't.