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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 5382596" data-attributes="member: 82106">Actually, being somewhat of an expert on this subject, I'm afraid I have to tell you that your notions of what is and isn't possible in the software world are not in line with the actual facts of the situation. There are various ways of defining the complexity of software. Regardless of which measures you use what you will find is that said complexity grows in a geometric fashion as any software incorporates more functionality. Beyond that even the 'simplest' seeming user applications incorporate vast amounts of code indirectly. For instance the Linux kernel includes several MILLION lines of source code. That makes it easily larger than the largest textual works ever written by man. Nobody fully understands these large bulks of code or all of the interactions that can happen. Many of these interactions are extremely rare and cannot feasibly be produced on demand by any testing framework.The upshot is that bugs ALWAYS exist. No piece of software ever written is bug free. In fact there is no known way by analysis to demonstrate that software IS bug free nor to identify where these bugs are. Various practices and processes can improve the reliability of software. All of them are very labor intensive and costly. The general result is that you can reduce and eliminate bugs pretty easily when there are lots of them, but the more work you do the less improvement you get per unit of work. At some point you establish a cutoff where you're say fixing a bug for every N hours of work. You can predict statistically at that point how often errors will show up in use, but you can't predict where they will show up or what they will be.Ergo software will be buggy in proportion both to its complexity and to the amount of money spent on SQA. For a commercial enterprise like WotC the question is only how much is the budget for this activity. Honestly, in my not at all humble because I know about this stuff opinion, the software WotC has produced so far looks pretty much like other fairly young applications which are produced for limited commercial use. They work, they generally do what they are supposed to, and they have a certain number of issues. Nobody LIKES bugs, but they are not something that is a sign of bad development processes. They are simply a result of the finite ability of human beings to understand and test very complex application logic.</blockquote>

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