The following is a *commentary* that provides some interesting insight into how we sometimes jump to conclusions before we attempt to understand each other's varying meanings attached to the same object or term.

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63,000 Bugs?

Dateline: 02/18/00

A recent article by Mary Jo Foley in Smart Reseller has touched off a small storm of controversy. Apparently an internal Microsoft memo has made its way into Smart Resellers hands, which describes 63,000 "bugs" in the Windows 2000 operating system (which was released on Thursday of this week). This has caused many people to ask the question, "Why should I pay so much for such a crappy product?" I am not personally in the habit of defending Microsoft's actions (or inactions) -- I figure Bill can take care of himself. However, if it were really true that Windows 2000 code contained this many actual defects, and was shipped anyway, it would certainly be cause for great concern.

The key to understanding the internal memo lies in understanding the term "bug," used in the memo. According to Jim Allchin, Group Vice President of the Platforms Group, Microsoft tracks internal development issues in a "bug database." These issues include "feature requests that someone may have mentioned or dreamed about, potentially confusing phrases in the documentation, performance improvement ideas, etc.most of which are clearly not bugs in the classic sense." Furthermore, Allchin notes,

"We also have a special advanced source code analyzer that we use. This tool generates a significant number of false positives (it "thinks" the code should be changed, but in fact it should not be). But, we track them all. The only way to be sure is to look at each hit and see if the issue is real or not. We love this tool. It helps us improve our code for readability and it can find bugs that our testing may not find. We also track our test code. There are over 10 million lines of test codethat can also have improvements, potential bugs, etc.that we track in the same database. So, we track together test code, shipping code, and future code for the next release (we always have future projects cranking out code long before the previous release ships). Technically, we keep all of this information in a single tracking system and simply query for the kinds of information we want. At the end of every release we need to clean up our database and code since it ends up accumulating lots of random data. The internal paper discussed doing this clean up."

In his open letter discussing the issue, Allchin asserts that Windows 2000 is "the highest quality product we have ever released." Does this mean that there will be no problems discovered and that anyone who installs Windows 2000 will be in computing Nirvana? Probably not, as evidenced by the recent announcement that Service Pack 1 for Windows 2000 will be available this summer. In the end, time will tell how many bugs surface, and how critical they are. It is worthy of note, however, that reviews of the final versions before the release of Windows 2000 have been almost unanimously positive.

So, what is the truth? Are there terrible defects in Windows 2000, and should we refrain from paying out our hard-earned money, or is there absolutely nothing to worry about - just harmless comments. As usual, I'm sure the truth lies somewhere in the middle.

~snip~

'Till next time,

Douglas Ludens Windows NT Guide, About.com

http://windowsnt.about.com/compute/windowsnt/library/weekly/aa021800a.htm

-- Jen Bunker (Jen@bunkergroup.com), February 23, 2000