Infobright Blog

When you have a new product obviously getting the product stable and shaking out all the bugs is a challenge. I’ve always liked all the silly little terms we use around defects. Like if I picked the product up like a rug and gave it a good shake, all the bugs would fall on the floor and I could just sweep them up. Done!

No matter how cute the terms are around defect removal, the fact is we actually put the nasty critters in the code in the first place. I would also say there is no substitute for good process (design, code reviews, test case reviews, test driven development and the like) in producing good solid code. But just the same, the defects still manage to sneak through. Your chances of 100% clean code drops considerably as the complexity of the application increases too.

So what’s going to shake down the product as fast as possible. Well, just plain usage. The team just doesn’t have access to the variety of data, applications, usage profiles as a few thousand users do. Open source can give your product that kind of exposure. That’s not to say that you should skip the former. Nobody is going to live through a buggy product even if it is free. But when you get the product to the stage when you have exhausted what you can afford or think of in terms of testing, this little difference in the open source model is going to take your product to the next level faster than you could ever accomplish with closed source.

ICE community, keep logging those bugs!