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Getting Buggy Wit It

The year 4500 bug and other horror stories from the software factory.

There I was, late one night in the Microsoft software factory, furiously exterminating some of the skankier bugs from my areas of Outlook 97, our e-mail program. My skill at writing software, I believe, is God-given. My legendary success at squashing bugs, I believe, is the result of my tendency to write buggy code. So it was no surprise when one of the dozens of software testers employed by the Outlook 97 team sent me urgent e-mail. He had discovered a giant bug in my area and was insistent I inspect it.

The first thing you do when a tester brings you a bug is reproduce it. In this case, reproduction would be easy. Step 1: Create an appointment in Outlook’s calendar. Step 2: Add a conference room to the appointment. So far so good. Step 3: Change the date of the appointment to the year 4500. Step 4: Switch to the meeting planner page. Step 5 …

Istopped reading the tester’s e-mail and wrote back. Although it was a bad bug, I felt confident I could ignore it for, oh, 2,000 years or so. But Shuman, the crowds chant, doesn’t that mean you willingly shipped buggy software? That you deliberately added to the torment of millions of computer users who can’t get their software to work? Why shouldn’t Outlook 97 be able to handle appointments in specified conference rooms in future millenniums?

Well, folks, I’ve got news for you: Nothing is perfect, and software is no exception. Today’s robust software products from Microsoft, Lotus, Borland, Corel, and all the rest are too damn complex to be perfect. How complex are they? Microsoft’s Windows 95 operating system contains more than 10 million lines of code, or instructions. Compare that with the 6 million parts in a Boeing 747, 3 million of which are fasteners such as rivets. Fasteners are wonderful, but they don’t interact much with one another. The difficult thing about writing software is that all 10 million parts of Windows 95 are tightly coupled. Pop a rivet on your 747, and you’re still likely to make your destination. But bollix up one line of code in Windows 95, and users’ computer screens will turn screaming blue and crash.

W hat are bugs, anyway? And what makes them more insidious than a few blown rivets? Bugs are errors, somewhat analogous to typos or factual errors in newspaper articles, but the difference is that a typo is almost never enough to spoil an entire edition of a newspaper, whereas a tiny error in a software program can scuttle it. Take the year 2000 bug for example. The Y2K bug arises because past programmers expressed years with two digits rather than four, so that the year 1915 is written as 15. Thus to the computer, the year 2015 looks the same as the year 1915. (Click to find out why programmers deliberately created the Y2K bug, and why that wasn’t such a crazy thing to do.) The Y2K bug is a very bad bug; the one tiny decision about how to express dates can bring a whole program to a screeching halt.

Bugs fall into two major categories: crashing and functional. Crashing bugs are so naughty that they cause programs to stop functioning. Usually, this results in friendly warnings–such as “Illegal Operation” for Windows users or the lovely picture of a bomb for Macintosh users. The other type of bug is a functional bug–e.g., the Y2K bug–which is subtler in nature. Functional bugs cause programs to fail or to give erroneous results. The number of either kind of bug is proportional to the size of the program.

B ut, as Shuman can tell you, it’s easy to write bugs into simple, short programs, like one designed to find a single word in a sentence. Actually, it’s not that simple an operation. You must write perfectly logical statements in a language that the computer can understand. If you were to write this program in C, a popular programming language, it would take three lines of code to tell the program to look at the beginning of the word and the beginning of each sentence. Next, you’d instruct the computer to match each character in the word you are searching for to the corresponding characters in the sentence. If the letters are the same, you continue. This would take five lines of code. Then you would have to confirm you have gone through all the letters in the word successfully. Chalk up two more lines. Then you’d need to see if there are any letters in the sentence left to compare. Two lines of code. Lastly, you would have to inform the user of your program what happened. Another three lines–15 lines of code to find one word! Shuman is exhausted just thinking about it, and he hasn’t even started creating bugs! Dropping one essential instruction or writing the lines of code in the wrong order could spell destruction for my little program. (For all the gory details on how I actually wrote this program in C, click.)

Civilians assume software companies spend most of their time writing software. Wrong! They spend most of their time testing software! After developers write a few lines of code, we test it for bugs and sit down with our testers to imagine all the ways the program will be used. Good testers make gnarly demands on the code, inventing disaster scenarios worthy of Hollywood. (My favorite tester routinely yanked the power cord out of the computer during Outlook operations to see how the program handled loss of power.) Testers run the software on different PCs–how will it work on a Hewlett Packard computer vs. a Packard Bell? They print with old printers. They enter thousands of lines of text into small fields. One tester placed most of the text of the King James Bible into an e-mail message, sent it to himself, and then replied to the e-mail. Outlook choked at this point, demanding a day of rest. God was watching. Here at Slate we rarely tug on the power cord to test our code, but we do test the site on a variety of browsers.

A t the beginning of a software project, code is buggy, because we’re still getting different parts of the program to cooperate. A line of code that tells the program how to print may clash with the code that tells the program how to draw the screen. As testers hunt bugs, developers conspire with the marketing department to add features to the product, which breeds more potential bugs. Adding new features to a stable program can be dangerous. Developers can create bugs faster than testers can capture them, and testers can capture them faster than developers can kill them, so the only way to finish a product is to stop adding features and start paying attention to the bugs.

Preventing developers from adding features is not as easy as it sounds. They love to build things–not to fix things. One way to deter them is to break their arms with a baseball bat. Given infinite time, developers would prefer to add feature upon feature and never release their product. But marketing people are the worst offenders when it comes to wanting to add new features, generating loud choruses of “NO” even from otherwise enthusiastic developers.

Agood tester is like the Roach Motel, corralling bugs and ensnaring them. “Look what I caught!” the tester meows as he drops the vermin on the developer’s doorstep. Testers are as vain about finding bugs as I am about squashing them, hence the excessive pride of my tester who uncovered the year 4500 bug.

Having found a bug, it’s not easy to find what caused it. Where is the bad assumption that got us into trouble? Some bugs are hell to track down. One crashing bug in Outlook would reproduce only on a Gateway computer equipped with a Matrox video card. Eventually, we tracked the bug down to one single line of code that failed because it assumed all graphics cards are created equal. They are not.

Bug fixing is time consuming. Developers must review every line of code, one at a time. They often deploy programs called “debuggers,” which allow them to peer into the innards of the software as it runs. As developers kill the bugs, they incorporate the solutions into a daily “build” of the program and test the build to make certain the solutions don’t cause additional bugs. Outlook 97 went through several thousand builds before it was released, each build bringing us infinitesimally closer to perfection.

As we approach perfection, though, the law of diminishing returns kicks in. Are the existing bugs fatal defects, or can we live with them? We developers have a name for bugs we can live with: “known issues.” By the time Outlook 97 was released in November 1997, I suspect I was intimate with every one of its known issues. I also suspect that 99 percent of all bugs reported by users to software companies have already been noted and prioritized for fixing by some late-night team of code warriors.

The worst bug is a “show stopper” bug, the bug that will croak the entire program. When a show stopper is discovered, we drop everything and find a fix. But we make the absolutely smallest necessary change to kill the bug so that the other parts of the system can continue to work, oblivious to the chaos around them.

Developers seek a balance between “it’s done” and “it’s perfect” when writing software. But it’s difficult to know when to stop. You are always only a few late nights away from perfection. Where refining a 747 is, shall we say, somewhat involved, software writing is powered on caffeine and little more. In fact, one enterprising young developer strung out on Mountain Dew eventually fixed the year 4500 bug in Outlook 98, making it safe for everyone making appointments in the next several millenniums.

If you missed our links in the article, click to read about why programmers created the Y2K bug and for a “simple” program in C.