Who Cares About Bugs?

Today we download applications all the time. On our smart-phone or a game on our computer. Hundreds of thousands of applications are available at our fingertips as we browse through the Google Play store, App Store or the Microsoft Marketplace. Having a platform providing easy access to applications had a huge impact on the software industry creating new markets we did not know of ten years ago. However, the advantage of having a platform over the cloud giving users easy access to hundreds of thousands of applications also has a downside.

When software where going to ship twenty years ago, having one single bug could have a huge impact on how the consumer market handled the product. A game could not possibly have a bug as the console did not have any internet connection for users to download a patch to fix whatever bug there was in the game. That way, the makers of the game had to spend a lot of time and money on testing and debugging the game. This became less and less relevant throughout the years as the Internet Revolution came along. Having a few bugs in a game or a movie editing software got acceptable as users could download a patch or an update from the product company's website. Today, we often see that an update is available on our phones or tablets. Apple first came along with their App Store, then Google (and after a while Microsoft). Their platform let users easily search up applications after need or interest. In the new platform of distributing and providing software, companies and developers could provide updates to their applications easier than ever before. A user would get a notification on the front-page of his device that an update was available, and with two clicks the update would install itself. This is a huge contrast to where users could not even receive a patch on a device not connected to the Internet.

When developing software there is a planning phase, development phase, test phase, then a release phase. The high availability of software had an impact on this model leading to Planning -> Development -> A bit testing -> Release -> Fix bugs reported -> release update and step back until new version with new features is ready. The affect of this is to expose end-users to more bugs having a negative impact on their experience with the final product. The reason of doing so is to get faster a user-share of the market and earn money faster. Having a product released two months before testing properly allows more users to use the product and therefore test it. It is a trend getting more and more popular in the software industry. 

It may not be surprising that the last release of SimCity is a big motivation for writing this post. There are many bugs in the game (which is a final product, and not a beta version) which I would say would have been obvious to fix during a proper test phase. Even so, long story short, EA let out the game to hundreds of thousands of users and it was the story of Diablo 3 all over again. Servers could not handle the capacity of all the users wanting to use their newly purchased software. And even when they finally got enough servers up, fixed their server bottlenecks, users where left with a stripped down version of the game which had far beyond an acceptable amount of bugs which a final product should have. On the other hand, Maxis has promised to fix the bugs and they are slowly fixing the bugs. I would say SimCity is one of many products which is a sign of a bad trend in the software industry, and end-users does not like it very well.