Software Bugs

Sun Feb 20 20:22:20 UTC 2011

> > 2) Who is doing a better job fixing them
> 
> Again, see the above discussion of severity.  If a vendor is good
about
> fixing the real show-stoppers in a matter of hours or days, but has a
> huge backlog of fixes for minor things, is that better or worse than a
> vendor that fixes half of both serious and minor things?
> 
> In addition, the question of how fixes get deployed matters too.  If a
> vendor is consistently good about finding a root cause, fixing it, and
> then saying "we'll ship the fix in the next dot-rev release", is that
> good or bad?
> Remember that if they ship a new, updated, more-fixed image every
week,
> that means you get to re-qualify a new image every week....

That also changes over time.  A vendor that might have been slow to fix
bugs 5 years ago might be completely different today or a vendor that
was particularly buggy 5 years ago might be rock solid today and the
opposite is also true.  Vendors can put out buggy stuff when they had
been very stable.

Use cases also vary widely and a portion of the software that might be
very buggy for some feature set might be completely transparent to you
because you don't use those features.  

The question is widely variable and very dependent on the deployment.
Generally, the simpler you build your network, the less bugs you are
going to run into.  The more features you use, the more likely you are
to run into them.