Talk:Anomaly in software

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[edit] Tokyo Exchange

quote "On 8th December 2005 hundreds of thousands of people wanted to buy at the stock exchange Tokyo shares which were offered for 1 Yen. What did happen? There were two input-fields: price and amount of shares to sell. One person wanted to sell only one share for 610000 Yen (around 4300 Euro), but he confused and typed: 610000 shares for 1 Yen."

Is this really an anomaly? If someone offers to sell shares below the market price, the offer will be reflected on the stock exchange. How is this a software anomaly?

[edit] Category:Anomaly in software

Hello, I have added the Category:Anomaly in software to put all anomalies together. Have a look there. If you know some pages, add them also please. --Erkan Yilmaz 10:23, 23 December 2006 (UTC)

The Category is changed now to: Category:Software_anomalies - please also see the discussion below for the reason. --Erkan Yilmaz 03:18, 24 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] one reason for this page

In this chapter I would like to explain one goal, why the article is written. In different forums, literature you can see, that people have different defintions, opinions on different terms (e.g. some of them: bug, fault, failure, error, defect, problem, deviation, glitch, incident):

  • "Outside of defining fault and failure, the software industry can still not agree on definitions. ... However, if you use the term to mean one specific thing, it may not be understood to be that thing by your audience since the terms are not used correctly."[1] Walter Görlitz at 20 October 2006
  • "Literature Review: The literature is rife with inconsistent usage of terminology. At one extreme, McConnell [69-72] makes no distinction between errors and defects in the examples he cites. At the polar opposite, Humphrey [311-313] elaborately states a bug is a defect but not all defects are bugs, and all defects result from errors but not all errors produce defects. Even the software measurements collected by pseudo-authoritative organizations reflect a lack of consensus: NASA and DoD refer to "defects", the Software Engineering Laboratory refers to "errors", and the Army refers to "faults" and "anomalies". [Christensen and Thayer, 478-483]" [2] Anthon Pang at 25 December, 2002
  • "People have argued for a long time about the definition of the term bug. Some people use the term as a synonym for defect, others as a synonym for feature.", Roger W. Sherman: Can We Ship It Yet? April 1996.
  • "Beizer (1991) equated the terms bug, glitch, error, slip, fault, and oversight, among others, as referring to some shortcoming in software. Ghezzi et al. (1992), although distinguishing between defects and failures, equated defects with faults, errors, and bugs." Houman Younessi: Object-Oriented Defect Management of Software: the Basics, Jun 28, 2002.
  • Bug vs Flaw discussion [3] in May 2005
  • "In the course of writing this article, I reviewed a few dozen books, articles and standards on software quality and software defects, trying to understand how different segments of the software industry deal with errors. I also reviewed many court cases and contract books, trying to understand how attorneys currently deal with software errors. These materials provided lots of data, but not a solid framework." [4] Cem Kaner: What is a Software Defect? 1996.

more examples to come.

This can result from: either people do not know (e.g. they are new to testing,...) and just hear/read from others, authors really have different definitions,...
Of course when everybody now would use the term anomaly only, there can arise problems like, people do not know immediately where the anomaly is located: e.g. is it something a user would experience(like a crash) or a spelling error in a never executed part of the sourcecode. So the term anomaly defines a common ground from where people can approach each other. --Erkan Yilmaz 02:57, 24 December 2006 (UTC)


[edit] points to improve

Hello, here are some things which I will implement soon:
1. "looks at faults/bugs from the end user perspective (or at least that is how it reads to me)"
2. "I thought it was a duplicate article and that it was very similar to the article on software bugs/faults
Then I reread it and understood that you were dealing with the more general subject of software requirements and end user expectation."

Erkan Yilmaz (evaluate me!, discussion) 18:30, 27 December 2006 (UTC)