Bob the Bug DB filter meets Mustang

The bug database has been an interesting experiment in that a front line vendor is saying, look here, we have all of these problems in our software being reported by our customers, which one would you like us to fix first?

As interesting as the process is, it ignores the lessons that product companies have learned, support will take up as many resources are you are willing to provide. Since most company’s resources are limited, they tend to put some sort of restriction in the support contracts. A common restriction is to say all reports can only come from Bob. Since Bob will get to see every problem, he will act as a filter to eliminate those problems he understands not be a bug or has already been reported upon. With the current bug reporting system, all of Sun engineering is Bob! I don’t know how much time Sun Bob spends trolling through the bug reports but if I were him right now I’d be screaming mad locked up in a padded room because the Mustang people (JDK 1.6) have decided to use a system analogous to D3 (Defect Driven Design).

D3 (pronounced D cubed) is a wonderful methodology devised by the sun (sic) backed developers working at FP&L (Juno Beach and I do mean right on the beach). In D3, there is only a request made for a system. In this methodology, the system is delivered immediately. No business analysts are needed to write up requirements because there is no requirements gathering phase. There is no design phase, no coding phase and best of all, no (for all us developers hate) testing phase. All you do is deploy and that can happen within minutes. If you are sitting there scratching your head asking yourself, how can this possibly work, then read on.

The deployment phase consists of dropping an icon on the customers desktop. The customer will then click on the Icon. Off course the Icon will not do anything… and the customer will lodge his first defect in the bug database, clicking on the icon does not open a window. We will of course respond by saying, oh, you’d like a window to open, no problem, we can fix that defect. We simply give the user a window to open. Now when the user opens the window and finds that he can’t entry a query, he simply writes up a new defect and the process of defect driven design continues.

If you’ve read the Mustang forums, they have suggested that if Java isn’t doing what you’d like it to be doing, you should make an entry in the bug database. In the spirit of the bug database, they suggest that we all go vote for our favorite RFE. They’ve also said that Mustang will be out in almost record time. Humm, has the Mustang development team adopted D3? If so I guess that leaves it up to Sun Bob to decide on how to respond to all of these new “defect” reports.

Hey Sun Bob if you’re reading this, someone contributed the defect. Apparently === does not work for some form of equals and I thought, wow what a great find! With that I wondered if ==== could be used for deep equals so I tried it. Unforunately, Java 1.5 has yet another defect in that it didn't work so if you see the defect report that ==== doesn't perform a deep equals, please don’t close it, it's mine.

And Sun Bob, if you were wondering why those in charge of the Mustang forum are recommending that new feature requests be put into a bug database, now you know!