John D. Cook recently issued a blog post, How many errors are left to find?, in which he introduces yet another silly quantitative model for estimating the number of bugs left in a program. The Lincoln Index, as Mr. Cook refers to it here, was used as a model for evaluating typographical errors, and was based on a method for estimating the population of a given species of animal. There … Read more
Dave Nicollette responds to my post on the Ellis Island bug. I appreciate his continuing the conversation that started in the comments to my post. Dave says, “In describing a ‘new’ category of software defect he calls Ellis Island bugs…”. I want to make it clear: there is nothing new about Ellis Island bugs, except the name. They’ve been with us forever, since before there were computers, even. He goes … Read more
A couple of years ago, I developed a version of a well-known reasoning exercise. It’s a simple exercise, and I implemented it as a really simple computer program. I described it to James Bach, and suggested that we put it in our Rapid Software Testing class. James was skeptical. He didn’t figure from my description that the exercise would be interesting enough. I put in a couple of little traps, … Read more
And now for the immodest part of the EuroSTAR 2009 Test Lab report: I won the Best Bug award, although it’s not clear to me which bug got the nod, since I reported several fairly major problems. I tested OpenEMR. For me, one candidate for the most serious problem would have been a consistent pattern of inconsistency in input handling and error checking. I observed over a dozen instances of … Read more