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Comment by asaph | Hacker News Reader

> Windows 10 is buggy. Android is buggy. iOS is buggy.

Let's not pretend bugs didn't exist in the pre-agile/scrum era. Bugs have been around as long as software has been around.

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Honorable mention to the fact that software used to be a lot harder to distribute. Making disks and CDs was slow and expensive, but now we can push a patch any time over the Internet. Why not ship fast when shipping a patch is just easy?

Where I work hot fixes for iOS apps often take more than a month. At a previous job I pushed App Store changes all the time in a day or two (if Apple was willing).

Because that inherently means pushing a shitty experience onto your users.

I think it's safe to say that bugs are way more predominant in software that used to be reliable. It's not that the software was completely bug free, it's the quantity and quality of the bugs now being presented.

I don’t think that’s safe to say at all. I’d love to see research that backed that up.

If anything I’d say we might be exposed to more bugs because the quantity of software has gone up, not that quality has gone down.

I don't think windows used to be more reliable. It used to crash all the time. Do you remember the blue screen of death[0]?

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Screen_of_Death

But I don't remember any BSOD wiping all my documents just like that.

I mean windows 95/98 didn't even use a journaled filesystem... a BSOD could wipe your documents...

Could it be that since software is just everywhere in our lives, and unless we need a strong enforcement of quality (I'm thinking of safety critical systems, which can still have flaws), then society is OK with it being released in that state?

The individual or organization making that call doesn't really get punished, while the upside can get even higher if they can release earlier, faster, etc.

There are now more completely obvious bugs in widely used software. It's like developers care less.

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