Speak for yourself. And we'll all be glad you don't write stuff for airplanes or missiles.
Being proud of shipping stuff with bugs because it generates revenue isn't something I'd crow about.
I do mostly embedded stuff. But I did write a Windows program (Mazemaker) which Brian Livingston included in one of his Windows Secrets books. So far as I am aware, no one ever encountered a bug once I released the program.
ML/NJ
Hey there’s a reason I didn’t go to work on software that moves metal or runs medicine. But I have friends that do, and you know what? Their software has bugs too.
I’m a realist. Nothing that has a million parts is without flaws. Even before software got put on them every plane in the air has issues. I know folks that worked on flight lines, both mechanics and pilots, part of check out on a plane is the mechanic giving the pilot the list of stuff that’s broken on the plane. It’s the nature of the world.
The question isn’t does your software have bugs, the question is how likely are they to be encountered and what happens when they are. There’s a secret combination of button clicks I can do to our client app that will crash it hard enough you need to uninstall it. It’s been in there for 6 years, nobody out in the field has ever run into it as far as we know. Largely because that secret combination involves over 100 different steps, including multiple openings and closings of the app. A bug for sure, but nobody is gonna hit it.
Less than 1% of our tech support calls result in bugs being written. When we got bought the company that bought us wouldn’t believe that. They considered 20% to be the target. They actually came down and “helped” us rerun the reports. Am I proud of our software? Hell yeah. I’m especially proud of the section I primarily work on which tech support considers a great achievement to get a bug against. But I’m not stupid. I know bugs get through, I just try to make sure those bugs are outside the normal usage so the customers don’t hit them. We aren’t moving metal, we aren’t giving medicine, we don’t need to be bullet proof. And our software is a hell of a lot more complex than any embedded system, which has bugs I can absolutely guarantee.