SOFTWARE BUG

A 'software bug' (or just "bug") is an error, flaw, mistake, failure, or fault in a computer program that prevents it from behaving as intended (e.g., producing an incorrect result). Most bugs arise from mistakes and errors made by people in either a program's source code or its design, and a few are caused by compilers producing incorrect code. A program that contains a large number of bugs, and/or bugs that seriously interfere with its functionality, is said to be 'buggy'. Reports detailing bugs in a program are commonly known as 'bug reports', fault reports, problem reports, trouble reports, change requests, and so forth.

Contents
Effects
Etymology
Prevention
Debugging
Managing bugs
Famous computer bugs
Security vulnerabilities
Common types of computer bugs
Bugs in popular culture
See also
Notes
External links

Effects


Bugs can have a wide variety of effects, with varying levels of inconvenience to the user of the program. Some bugs have only a subtle effect on the program's functionality, and may thus lie undetected for a long time. More serious bugs may cause the program to crash or freeze leading to a denial of service. Others qualify as security bugs and might for example enable a malicious user to bypass access controls in order to obtain unauthorized privileges.
The results of bugs may be extremely serious. A bug in the code controlling the Therac-25 radiation therapy machine was directly responsible for some patient deaths in the 1980s. In 1996, the European Space Agency's US$1 billion prototype Ariane 5 rocket was destroyed less than a minute after launch, due to a bug in the on-board guidance computer program. In June 1994, a Royal Air Force Chinook crashed into the Mull of Kintyre, killing 29. This was initially dismissed as pilot error, but an investigation by ''Computer Weekly'' uncovered sufficient evidence to convince a House of Lords inquiry that it may have been caused by a software bug in the aircraft's FADEC. [1]

Etymology


The concept that software might contain errors dates back to 1842 in Ada Byron's notes on the analytical engine in which she speaks of the difficulty of preparing program 'cards' for Charles Babbage's Analytical engine:
Usage of the term "bug" to describe inexplicable defects has been a part of engineering jargon for many decades and predates computers and computer software; it may have originally been used in hardware engineering to describe mechanical malfunctions. For instance, Thomas Edison wrote the following words in a letter to an associate in 1878:
Problems with radar electronics during World War II were referred to as ''bug''s (or glitches), and there is additional evidence that the usage dates back much earlier.
Photo of what is possibly the first real bug found in a computer.

The invention of the term is often erroneously attributed to Grace Hopper, who publicized the cause of a malfunction in an early electromechanical computer. A typical version of the story is given by this quote:
Hopper was not actually the one who found the insect, as she readily acknowledged. And the date was September 9 1947, not of 1945.[2][3] The operators who did find it (including William "Bill" Burke, later of the Naval Weapons Laboratory, Dahlgren Va. [4]), were familiar with the engineering term and, amused, kept the insect with the notation "First actual case of bug being found." Hopper loved to recount the story. [5]
While it is certain that the Mark II operators did not coin the term "bug", it has been suggested that they did coin the related term, "debug". Even this is unlikely, since the Oxford English Dictionary entry for "debug" contains a use of "debugging" in the context of airplane engines in 1945 (see the debugging article for more).

Prevention


Bugs are a consequence of the nature of the programming task. Some bugs arise from simple oversights made when computer programmers write source code carelessly or transcribe data incorrectly. Many off-by-one errors fall into this category. Other bugs arise from unintended interactions between different parts of a computer program. This happens because computer programs are often complex, often having been programmed by several different people over a great length of time, so that programmers are unable to mentally keep track of every possible way in which different parts can interact. Many race condition bugs fall into this category.
The computer software industry has put a great deal of effort into finding methods for preventing programmers from inadvertently introducing bugs while writing software. These include:
; Programming style : Bugs are often created by typos that are not caught by the compiler. Various innovations in programming style and defensive programming are designed to make these bugs less likely, or easier to spot.
; Programming techniques : Bugs often create inconsistencies in the internal data of a running program. Programs can be written to check the consistency of their own internal data while running. If an inconsistency is encountered, the program can immediately halt, so that the bug can be located and fixed. Alternatively, the program can simply inform the user, attempt to correct the inconsistency, and continue running.
; Development methodologies : There are several schemes for managing programmer activity, so that fewer bugs are produced. Many of these fall under the discipline of software engineering (which addresses software design issues as well.) For example, formal program specifications are used to state the exact behavior of programs, so that design bugs can be eliminated.
; Programming language support : Programming languages often include features which help programmers deal with bugs, such as exception handling. In addition, many recently-invented languages have deliberately excluded features which can easily lead to bugs. For example, the Java programming language does not support pointer arithmetic.

Debugging


The typical bug history (GNU Classpath project data). A bug, submitted by the user, is ''unconfirmed.'' A reproduced bug is a ''confirmed'' bug. The confirmed bugs are later ''fixed''. Bugs, belonging to other categories (unreproducible, will not be fixed, etc) are usually in the minority

Finding and fixing bugs, or "debugging", has always been a major part of computer programming. Maurice Wilkes, an early computing pioneer, described his realization in the late 1940s that much of the rest of his life would be spent finding mistakes in his own programs. As computer programs grow more complex, bugs become more common and difficult to fix. Often programmers spend more time and effort finding and fixing bugs than writing new code.
Usually, the most difficult part of debugging is locating the erroneous part of the source code. Once the mistake is found, correcting it is usually easy. Programs known as debuggers exist to help programmers locate bugs. However, even with the aid of a debugger, locating bugs is something of an art. It is not uncommon for a bug in one section of a program to cause failures in a completely different section, thus making it especially difficult to track (for example, an error in a graphic rendering routine causing a file I/O routine to fail); this is most commonly caused by errors that lead to the corruption of program instructions or variables in memory.
Typically, the first step in locating a bug is finding a way to reproduce it easily. Once the bug is reproduced, the programmer can use a debugger or some other tool to monitor the execution of the program in the faulty region, and find the point at which the program went astray. Sometimes, a bug is not a single flawed instruction, but represents an error of thinking or planning on the part of the programmer. Such ''logic errors'' require a section of the program to be overhauled or rewritten.
It is not always easy to reproduce bugs. Some bugs are triggered by inputs to the program which may be difficult for the programmer to re-create. One cause of the Therac-25 radiation machine deaths was a bug that occurred only when the machine operator very rapidly entered a treatment plan; it took days of practice to become able to do this, so the bug did not manifest in testing or when the manufacturer attempted to duplicate it. Other bugs may disappear when the program is run with a debugger; these are heisenbugs (humorously named after the Heisenberg uncertainty principle.)
Debugging is still a tedious task requiring considerable manpower. Since the 1990s, particularly following the Ariane 5 Flight 501 disaster, there has been a renewed interest in the development of effective automated aids to debugging. For instance, methods of static code analysis by abstract interpretation have already made significant achievements, while still remaining much of a work in progress.

Managing bugs


It is common practice for software to be released with known bugs that are considered non-critical. While software products contain an unknown number of unknown bugs when shipped, measurements during the testing may provide a statistically reliable estimate of the number of likely bugs remaining. Most big software projects maintain a list of "known bugs". This list inform users about bugs that are not fixed in the current release, or not fixed at all, and often a workaround is offered additionally.
There are various reasons for such a list:

★ The developers often don't have time to fix all non-severe bugs.

★ The bug could be fixed in a new version or patch that is not yet released.

★ The changes to the code required to fix the bug would be large, and would bring with them the chance of introducing other bugs into the system.
Given the above, it is often considered impossible to write completely bug-free software of any real complexity. So bugs are categorized by severity, and low-severity non-critical bugs are tolerated, as they do not impact the proper operation of the system, for the majority of users. NASA's SATC managed to reduce number of errors to fewer than 0.1 per 1000 lines of code (SLOC) but this was not felt to be feasible for any real world projects.
One school of thought, popularized by Eric S. Raymond as Linus's Law in his essay ''The Cathedral and the Bazaar'', holds that popular open-source software holds a better chance of being bug-free than other software, because "given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow".[6] This assertion has been disputed, however; computer security specialist Elias Levy wrote that "it is easy to hide vulnerabilities in complex, little understood and undocumented source code," because, "even if people are reviewing the code, that doesn't mean they're qualified to do so."[7]

Famous computer bugs


===Space exploration===

★ NASA Mariner 1 went off-course during launch, due to a missing 'bar' in its FORTRAN software (July 22, 1962).[2]

★ NASA Apollo 11 landing problem (July 20, 1969).

★ NASA Voyager 2 (January 25, 1986).

Phobos 1 lost (September 10, 1988).

★ ESA Ariane 5 Flight 501 self-destruction 40 seconds after takeoff (June 4, 1996).

★ NASA Mars Climate Orbiter destroyed due to entry of momentum data in imperial units instead of the metric system (September 23, 1999).

Mars Polar Lander lost (December 3, 1999).

★ NASA Mars Rover freezes due to too many open files in flash memory (January 21, 2004).

★ NASA Mars Global Surveyor battery failure was the result of a series of events linked to a computer error made five months before (November 2, 2006).[3]
===Medical===

★ The Therac-25 accidents (1985-1987), which caused at least five deaths.

★ A misuse of medical diagnosis software created by Multidata Systems International, at the National Cancer Society in Panama City, caused, by different estimates, between five and eight cancer patients to die of over-radiation. (2000)
===Computing===

★ The year 2000 problem, popularly known as the "Y2K bug", spawned fears of worldwide economic collapse and an industry of consultants providing last-minute fixes.

★ The Pentium FDIV bug.
===Electric power transmission===

★ The 2003 North America blackout was triggered by a local outage that went undetected due to a race condition in General Electric Energy's XA/21 monitoring software.
===Telecommunications===

AT&T long distance network crash (January 15, 1990), documented in Bruce Sterling's ''The Hacker Crackdown''.
===Military===

★ The software error of a MIM-104 Patriot, which ultimately contributed to the deaths of 28 Americans in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia (February 25, 1991).

Chinook crash on Mull of Kintyre: the cause of this event remains a mystery, but strong suspicions have been raised that software problems were a contributory factor.
===Video games===

★ The Missingno. and Glitch City bugs, found in the ''Pokémon'' series

★ The Minus World in NES version of ''Super Mario Brothers''

Security vulnerabilities


Malicious software may attempt to exploit known vulnerabilities in a system - which may or may not be bugs. Viruses are 'not' bugs in themselves - they are typically programs that are doing precisely what they were designed to do. However, viruses are occasionally referred to as such in the popular press.

Common types of computer bugs



Divide by zero

NULL pointer dereference

Infinite loops

Arithmetic overflow or underflow

★ Exceeding array bounds

★ Using an uninitialized variable

★ Accessing memory not owned (Access violation)

Memory leak or Handle leak

Stack overflow or underflow

Buffer overflow

Deadlock

Off by one error

Race condition

★ Loss of precision in type conversion

Bugs in popular culture



★ In the 1968 novel (and the ), a spaceship's onboard computer, HAL 9000, is programmed with two conflicting objectives: to fully disclose all its information, and to keep the true purpose of the flight secret from the crew. This conflict causes HAL to eventually try to kill all the crew members (since, if there were no crew, there would be no contradiction).

★ The 2004 novel ''The Bug'', by Ellen Ullman, is about a programmer's attempt to find an elusive bug in a database application.

See also



Glitch

ISO 9126, which classifies a bug as either a 'defect' or a 'nonconformity'

Workaround

Bug tracking system

Bit rot

Anti-pattern

Unusual software bugs (schroedinbug, heisenbug, Bohr bug, and mandelbug)

Hysterical raisins, or hard-to-explain features that are kept for backward compatibility

Notes


1. The Chinook Helicopter Disaster
2. Definition of bug
3. Log Book With Computer Bug
4. IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, Vol 22 Issue 1, 2000
5. First Computer Bug
6. "Release Early, Release Often", Eric S. Raymond, ''The Cathedral and the Bazaar''
7. "Wide Open Source", Elias Levy, ''SecurityFocus'', April 17, 2000

External links



Collection of Software Bugs (Thomas Huckle, TU München)

Computer-Related Incidents with Commercial Aircraft (Peter B. Ladkin et al., Universität Bielefeld)

An Investigation of the Therac-25 Accidents (Nancy Leveson, University of Washington and Clark S. Turner, University of California at Irvine)

Fatal Dose: Radiation Deaths linked to AECL Computer Errors (Barbara Wade Rose, Canadian Coalition for Nuclear Responsibility)

Software Horror Stories (Nachum Dershowitz)

Software Does Not Fail (Paul Niquette]

Picture of the "first computer bug" The error of this term is elaborated above. (Naval Historical Center)

Page from 1947 log book with "first actual case of bug being found" (moth) (National Museum of American History)

The First Computer Bug! An email from 1981 about Adm. Hopper's bug

How to Report Bugs Effectively (Simon G. Tatham)

Rates of Design Failure

Bug Tracking Basics: A beginner’s guide to reporting and tracking defects (Mitch Allen)

History's Worst Software Bugs

Bug Isolation Project - This project is to track bugs of popular open source software. (Packages for Fedora available)''

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