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by photochemsyn 1056 days ago
A defective device in my mind would have some obviously fatal flaw - it wouldn't even start up, parts would be broken and dangling off, etc. QC immediately rejects it and it doesn't get incorporated into more complex systems.

A buggy device is much worse for any critical application - it appears to work under inspection, and even limited testing, but 1% of the time it develops some fatal data race condition that causes it to fail erratically and cause havoc, e.g. the Therac-25.

So buggy is a subset of defective but it's even worse?

1 comments

Defects in, eg, pressure vessels can be hard to spot and then suddenly explode when the product is used — sometimes only after a period of seemingly normal operation.

They’re still defects.