With Murphy's Law, telling us that if it can go wrong it will and the potential for the consequences, both directly and indirectly related/attributable to computer bugs can be extremely serious in deed.
Engineers have for example been attributing many of the “unexplainable” errors, flaws and imperfections of technology directly to the presence of bugs. So what is a computer bug and what can we do about it?
Figure 1: Computer Bugs
Bug
In computer circles a computer bug (including bugs of both hardware and/or software origin) is an unplanned error, flaw, failure or other (usually undocumented) aspect that prevents the machine from behaving as intended.
The cause of the production of these incorrect answers/results and unwanted behaviors by computers can often be directly attributable to computer bugs of one type or another.
Buggy
The term “Buggy” refers to software and hardware components containing large numbers of bugs. Their performance, reliability and trustworthiness are thus not 100% guaranteed are all times.
Bug Reports
Names given to reports dealing with bug related issues vary depending on your current locale and include bug report(s), fault report(s), trouble report(s) and change request(s).
Issues not Bugs
It is a question of semantics. The term “bug” has been in common usage by engineers for quite some time now but many organizations and developers deliberately avoid using the term.
One reason recently cited for this is as a direct result of the negative baggage that accompanies the term. Microsoft for example uses the term “issues” in replacement of “bugs”.
Computer Bug Origins
The origins of the term “computer bugs” stretch back a long way. Some of the events, circumstances and people put forward as being the source of the term “bug/bugs” differ considerably.
One popular tale that does have some basis in fact concerns an early computer pioneer named Grace Hopper, who back in 1947, was working on a system called the Mark II (an early electromechanical computer).
She is supposed to have found a moth trapped in a relay among the computer's vacuum tubes. Hopper readily concedes that she was not the one who actually found the moth.
She was however, the one who publicized the event. It would seem that the operators who did find the moth were familiar with the use of the engineering term “bug” and thought it amusing to tape the moth to their report of the incident with the following notation "First actual case of bug being found." See Fig. 2.
Figure 2: “First actual case of bug being found.”
We know that the term “bug” was used during World War II to refer to faults and issues with the development of radar electronics. In fact, engineers were using the term “bug” in relation to defects long before the Hopper event. For example, early 1890s editions of the Oxford English Dictionary included the following quotation from an 1889 edition of the Pall Mall Gazette:
“Mr. Edison, I was informed, had been up the two previous nights discovering "a bug" in his phonograph-an expression for solving a difficulty, and implying that some imaginary insect has secreted itself inside and is causing all the trouble”.
Figure 3: Thomas Edison
The Mr. Edison (Fig. 3) referred to here is none other than Thomas Alva Edison. Edison was one of the first inventors to apply the principles of mass production to the process of invention. He is therefore is often credited with the creation of the first industrial research laboratory.
Human Error
Bugs generally result from human error somewhere along the way. The design, product development and production implementation stages of all forms of computer technologies are the major areas in which bugs tend to creep into the system. They also happen to be the areas in which human involvement is maximal.
Hardware Bugs
While a larger percentage of computer bugs have their basis in software, there are still many instances where hardware is at fault. As with any other piece of hardware a computer's hardware can components can fail, thereby producing erroneous results.
Events from the past show that it is also possible for the computer hardware to have bugs built into them (we must assume not deliberately). A classical case of this was the Pentium FDIV bug.
Back in the early 1990s, a number of Intel Pentium processors contained hardware errors that resulted in erratic performance and unreliable computation of floating point division operations. The result was that Intel had to recall a considerable number of the faulty Pentium processors.
Impact
The consequences resultant from bugs varies considerably in terms of the severity of impact. They also vary in terms of frequency and in their potential to produce far-flung collateral damage.
