Out of Sync: Maddy's Blog

http://blogs.sun.com/dillon/entry/firestar#comments

There is more to our open source commitment than just freeing code - defending the community as well! 

What are the factors that affect the number of bugs a software has?  Or to ask the same question from a different perspective, does bug free software mean good software?  

Let's examine the intricacies of the issue.  In a simplified view, bugs are result  of a) QA's diligence b) ability of the programmer.  What this means is that an abundance of bugs doesn't necessarily mean the QA process was perfect and could be due to lack of checks on the development side. In the same way , lack of bug could mean QA process is not proper and doesn't necessarily mean development processes are water tight.

But there is a third factor which is generally missed - the available features of the software.  Theoritically multiple  iterations of bug fixing should result in the software being almost bug free.  i.e mature products which have existed for quite a while should be devoid of any major bugs.  But during the period, the scope of the problems which the software can be used as a tool to resolve would have increased and if the software has not been modified to address those issues, then the software quality should still be deemed bad.  As we all know, introducing new features always results in bugs - this by itself is not a very bad thing as long as a)  they don't break basic functionality b) provide an improved user experience.

To represent mathematically,

# of  bugs (X  robustness of the QA process X features provided by the software / robustness of the development process.        

From the above logic, in an ideal scenario, where the QA processes and dev processes are both very robust, quantity of the bugs will be proportional to the number of new features introduced in the release!

The first release of Solaris Cluster Express is now available for download from the following link: http://www.sun.com/download/products.xml?id=46a94a22. You can run it on build 67 of Nevada. Remember, in this release, the agents are open sourced! The next project planned for open source is cluster's DR solution - Geographic Edition!

Just to re-iterate, the software can run on *32 bit platforms as well* !!  That means you can form a cluster on your laptop itself!  Yes.  Download the software on your laptop with Solaris OS * (S10u3) and make a single node cluster. Create multiple zones within the node and failover applications between zones!  All you need to do is check if the SUNWscka package is installed.  If it is not, add it from the distribution.

This great for consultants who need to demo failover between nodes to customers without the luxury of having 64 bit boxes.  Hopefully this release will do to Sun Cluster what OpenSolaris did to Solaris!!