Every company that produces a product has to be accountable for the safety of the product, except for software manufacturers. If you've ever read the clause in any business application they always say that they are not responsible for data loss or file corruption. Obviously there are a lot of factors other than the program it's self that can cause corruption, so a software manufacturer can't be held accountable for everything, but with computer code showing up in practically every machine that we use, maybe there should be a national standard for code that's written for products that can be potentially lethal.
If any of you have ever looked at code before, you'll know that every writer has his own style, so anybody that QA's code has to be familiar with that programmers style in order to inspect it throughly. If there was a coding standard and a federal agency to enforce it would this hurt or help the software industry?
RoverRoad
Posts: 1492 | Location: USA | Registered: 06-05-02
Defective code doesn't last long. Except if it's Microsoft. But even then, only in the OS where they have a monopoly. Their code in Explorer improved dramatically, and their Office Suite is pretty stable.
Introducing some lame brain federal standard to writing code would probably end up something like the FDA where you'd have to spend a billion dollars to bring a product to market. And then when it got there - it would suck anyway.
Posts: 402 | Location: Austin, Texas, USA | Registered: 06-03-02
I have found on my travels around the internet that no code sucks like the spyware code that gets installed.
The biggest problem you have is the number of variables that you may have. Different Hardware drivers, different applications all react in a different way when installed depending what else is installed.
It would be virtually impossible for a programmer to determine how the program is likely to behave given the number of potential programs it COULD conflict with
