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Comment by ryandrake | Hacker News Reader

> Bugs will always happen in production.

This is not some universal law. It’s true only when the project/team is not willing to make the trade-offs (like development speed) needed to deploy bug-free code. For most software it’s better to release with bugs, but not so for all software. For some software, like safety critical projects, things launched into space, etc, it’s better to take your time and release without bugs.

Besides, good development practices, good requirements, good change control, and good testing can prevent the vast majority of bugs from reaching production. Sadly, this idea that bugs in production are inevitable is pervasive in industry.

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In order for that to happen, you would need perfect practices, perfect requirements, perfect testing and perfect ‘change control’, and an inhuman ability to never make a human mistake in the understanding of any one of those things within your team of equally perfect people, so add perfect communication on to the list.

Anything less than perfection at any stage will be a vector for bugs, whether that bug is a syntax error, unexpected behavior, or a fully tested and functional feature that doesn’t meet expectation.

Mistakes are inevitable and not necessarily bad when you handle them well (move fast and break things says nothing about what you do with all the breakage, so feels immature). Calling them bugs doesn’t change that.

Can you point to a violation of this observation? Operating systems, CPUs, compilers, and software at large have all had bugs. Can you point to anything meaningful that has not been susceptible to bugs in production?

> good development practices, good requirements, good change control, and good testing can prevent the vast majority of bugs

prevention of the vast majority of bugs does not negate the claim that bugs will always happen in production.

I am skeptical deploying a non trivial project to production without bugs is a viable strategy, even for safety critical projects. I imagine the bugs are just much less severe.

It is not even easy to tell whether a piece of software has no bugs or just none you have seen.

Arguably some of the most conservative and careful devs in the world managed to crash a spaceship into Mars and you know they fully subscribed to "take your time and release without bugs."

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