Royal Pain

[cbbrowne-HInyCGIudOg at public.gmane.org]

> On Fri, Jun 18, 2004 at 07:27:26AM -0400, James Knott wrote:
> > And of course, it's impossible to prove there are no bugs.  You can only 
> > fail to find some.
> 
> That is actually not true.  If you have a well defined specification of
> what the behaviour of each piece of the program must be for specific
> inputs, you can actually prove the behaviour of each part of the program
> correct.  This is in fact done at some software companies.  It is
> certainly a lot more work and costs more.  It requires proper bounds
> checks, and full coverage testing at the very least.

And that "well defined specification" part is where things generally go
SO wrong that the process is made clearly futile to everyone involved.

They may come up with "well defined specifications" for aerospace system
components, but those get written by engineers for engineers.

In contrast, business systems tend to have fuzzy descriptions, and are
anything BUT well-specified.
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