Great product only 63000 bugs!
To: +MythMan (9905 )
From: +eddie r gammon Wednesday, Feb 16 2000 6:48AM ET
Reply # of 10210
Looooong article but it's a HO HO for soft. May take a hickey today.
Bugfest: Windows 2000 Has 65,000 Bugs
By Mary Jo Foley, Sm@rt Reseller
February 12, 2000 2:25 PM EST
Not everyone will be having fun at Microsoft Corp. next week. While the software
giant and its partners celebrate the arrival of Windows 2000 on Thursday, Feb. 17,
hundreds of members of the Windows development team will be busy cleaning up the
mess.
Not the launch-party mess. The code mess. According to an internal Microsoft
(Nasdaq: MSFT) memo viewed by Sm@rt Reseller, the company needs to fix tens of
thousands of bugs contained in the final Win2000 release code. Fixing these bugs is
the top-priority assignment for Microsoft group VP Jim Allchin's Windows team.
"Our customers do not want us to sell them products with over 63,000 potential
known defects. They want these defects corrected," stated one of Microsoft's
Windows development leaders, Marc Lucovsky, in the memo. "How many of you
would spend $500 on a piece of software with over 63,000 potential known
defects?"
According to the Microsoft memo, the Windows 2000 source-code base contains:
More than 21,000 "postponed" bugs, an indeterminate number of which Microsoft is
characterizing as "real problems." Others are requests for new functionality, and
others reflect "plain confusion as to how something is supposed to work."
More than 27,000 "BugBug" comments. These are usually notes to developers to
make something work better or more efficiently. According to Microsoft, they tend
to represent "unfinished work" or "long-forgotten problems."
Overall, there are more than 65,000 "potential issues" that could emerge as
problems, as discovered by Microsoft's Prefix tool. Microsoft is estimating that
28,000 of these are likely to be "real" problems.
"Our goal for the next release of Windows 2000 is to have zero bugs. The only way
this happens is if you take it upon yourselves to fix the bugs that should be fixed,
and close the bugs that should be closed," continued Lucovsky in his note to the
development team.
He added that no new code for future Windows releases, such as Whistler and
Blackcomb, will be allowed to be "checked in" until the development team has fixed
the existing Windows 2000 bugs.
Microsoft's response
A spokeswoman for Microsoft strongly defended Windows 2000's quality. "Bugs are
inherent in computer science," she said. "All software ships with issues. The
difference is (that) no software in the history of Microsoft development has ever
been through the incredible, rigorous internal and external testing that Windows
2000 has been through."
The spokeswoman said 750,000 testers received each beta version of Windows
2000. She said "hundreds of companies have signed off on the incredibly high quality
and reliability of Windows 2000."
The result, she said, is that hundreds of companies are deploying Windows 2000
before general availability.
One developer, informed of Microsoft's bug estimates, said all new software ships
with lots of bugs but few software vendors are willing to acknowledge this reality.
"The fact that Microsoft found that many bugs indicates to me just how thorough
their testing processes are," said the Windows developer, who requested anonymity.
Waiting for bug fixes
But others aren't so sure. Market researchers have repeated warnings to their
clients against upgrading immediately to Win2000. Several outfits have advised
customers to wait until Microsoft issues its first or second service pack before
deploying Win2000. And research outfits made these suggestions before the exact
bug tallies came to light.
Despite these bugs, Microsoft has made Windows 2000's reliability a key focus and
part of its marketing message for months. At Comdex/Fall last year, Allchin detailed
the two-year-old reliability initiative upon which Microsoft had embarked to insure
Win2000 would be more stable and reliable than NT 4.0 or its predecessors.
Allchin said Microsoft spent 500 person-years and $162 million on people and tools
specifically to improve reliability of the product.
In more recent weeks Microsoft has plastered ads on buses, billboards and
telephone booths in a number of major cities. "Windows 2000 is coming. Online or
off, a standard in reliability," reads the text.
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