Joseph D. Darcy's Sun Weblog

Friday March 07, 2008

Bugs as good news

Often a new bug being reported is not regarded as a cause for celebration, especially late in a release! However, I strive to be dispassionate enough to genuinely welcome a new bug report if the bug is valid and thereby improves the accuracy of the bug database. Ignorance of bugs should not be confused with the absence of bugs. Only when the bug database is accurate, reflecting most of the actual defects and being largely free of spurious issues, is the correlation between the state of the database and the state of the product high enough to draw inferences about the quality of the product based on information in the database.