Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by Aachen 863 days ago
What do you call it when the spec is wrong? Like clearly actually wrong, such as when someone copied a paragraph from one CRUD-describing page to the next and forgot to change the word "thing1" to "thing2" in the delete description.

Because I'd call that a bug. A spec bug, but a bug. It's no feature request to make the code based on the newer page delete thing2 rather than thing1, it's fixing a defect
2 comments
SilasX 863 days ago
There’s the distinction between correctness and fitness for purpose which I think is helpful for clarifying the issues here.

Correctness bug: it didn’t do what the spec says it should do.

Fitness for purpose bug: it does what the spec says to do, but, with better knowledge, the spec isn’t what you actually want.

Edit: looks like this maps, respectively, to failing verification and failing validation. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39359673

Edit2: My earlier comment on the different things that get called "bugs", before I was aware of this terminology: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22259973

link
pinkmuffinere 863 days ago
Ya, I would like a word for this as well. I naturally refer to this category of error as bug, but this occasionally leads to significant conflict with others at work. I now default to calling _almost everything_ a feature request, which is obviously dumb but less likely to get me into trouble. If there is a better word for "it does exactly what we planned, but what we planned was wrong" I would love to adopt it.
link
Aachen 863 days ago
I reported such a bug to some software my company uses (Tempo). Vendor proceeds to call it a feature request because the software successfully fails to show public information (visible in the UI, but HTTP 403 in the API unless you're an admin).

Instead of changing one word in the code that defines the access level required for this GET call, it gets triaged as not being a bug, put on a backlog, and we never heard from it again obviously

We pay for this shit

link
pinkmuffinere 863 days ago
Successful failure is my favorite kind, I like to think that all my failures are successful
link