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.

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