Living with Bugs and Errors

Does your car make funny sounds that you ignore? Does your web browser quit on you? Do your software applications quit all of a sudden, right before you save? Do you have a door that doesn't close quite right? or a key that you have to jiggle to turn?

I don't mind having a few bugs and errors in my life. Workarounds are just part of life. But not everyone agrees. People fall all across the spectrum of what they kinds of bugs and errors that they are willing to live with in a product and what they are unable to live with. Some people think of a buggy product as "quirky," and other's think of then as "broken."

There is a delicate balance that smart companies try to strike between sinking time and money into making a product perfect and the cost of losing customers. And let's face it, debugging is the worst part of making a product; just ask a programmer what he hates most about his job (other than his boss.)

It's inevitable that as technology and software continues to get more and more advanced and complicated, that it's going to get buggier and buggier. Have you ever used the autosave feature built into all of Microsoft Office. I attest that the autosave was first introduced because it was extremely likely that the software was going to crash and lose all your work. As technology continues to become more comples, we will find either find ourselves living with more and more "quirks" in our products, or we will need to find a new process to elegantly and cheaply create and develop programs and products that are bug and mistake free.