{"id":9603,"date":"2011-09-20T07:00:00","date_gmt":"2011-09-20T07:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.msdn.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/2011\/09\/20\/microspeak-the-bug-farm\/"},"modified":"2011-09-20T07:00:00","modified_gmt":"2011-09-20T07:00:00","slug":"microspeak-the-bug-farm","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/20110920-00\/?p=9603","title":{"rendered":"Microspeak: The bug farm"},"content":{"rendered":"<p> In its most general sense, the term <i>bug farm<\/i> refers to something that is a rich source of bugs. <\/p>\n<p> It is typically applied to code which is nearly unmaintainable. Code can arrive in this state through a variety of means. <\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Poor initial design. <\/li>\n<li>An initial design that has been pushed     far beyond its original specification     (resulting in features built on top of other features in weird ways). <\/li>\n<li>Overwhelming compatibility constraints     such that the tiniest perturbation is     highly likely to cause some application somewhere to stop working. <\/li>\n<li>Responsibility for the code residing in people whom we shall     euphemistically describe as     &#8220;failing to meet your personal standards of code quality.&#8221; <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p> The term is most often used as a cautionary term, calling attention to areas where there is high risk that code you&#8217;re about to write is going to result in a bug farm. <\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"q\"><p> Aren&#8217;t we setting ourselves up for a bug farm? <\/p><\/blockquote>\n<blockquote class=\"q\"><p> This could easily lead to a bug farm from different lifetimes for this various state objects. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p> The term is quite popular at Microsoft (<b>pre-emptive snarky comment<\/b>: because Microsoft software is all one giant bug farm). Here are some citations just from <code>blogs.msdn.com<\/code>: <\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"q\"><p> Layout runs under disable processing. The reason we did that is because, well, <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.msdn.com\/b\/nickkramer\/archive\/2006\/05\/06\/591252.aspx\"> reentrant layout is a bug farm<\/a>. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n<blockquote class=\"q\"><p> A lot of testers suddenly realized that case sensitivity is <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.msdn.com\/b\/michkap\/archive\/2005\/05\/11\/416293.aspx\"> a veritable bug farm<\/a> on a project that thinks it is ready to go, but has not yet tried it. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n<blockquote class=\"q\"><p> That type of implicit vs. explicit inference also <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.msdn.com\/b\/ansonh\/archive\/2004\/03\/13\/89185.aspx\"> turned out to be a bug farm<\/a>. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n<blockquote class=\"q\"><p> Did you forget to handle an entire set of test cases?  Is the features implementation overly complex and <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.msdn.com\/b\/larsberg\/archive\/2005\/09\/05\/461182.aspx\"> going to be a bug farm<\/a>? <\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In its most general sense, the term bug farm refers to something that is a rich source of bugs. It is typically applied to code which is nearly unmaintainable. Code can arrive in this state through a variety of means. Poor initial design. An initial design that has been pushed far beyond its original specification [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1069,"featured_media":111744,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[105,26],"class_list":["post-9603","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-oldnewthing","tag-microspeak","tag-other"],"acf":[],"blog_post_summary":"<p>In its most general sense, the term bug farm refers to something that is a rich source of bugs. It is typically applied to code which is nearly unmaintainable. Code can arrive in this state through a variety of means. Poor initial design. An initial design that has been pushed far beyond its original specification [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9603","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1069"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9603"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9603\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/111744"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9603"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9603"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9603"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}