Heard the joke about the three engineers riding in a car that starts sputtering along the highway? The electrical engineer suggests they check the ignition. The mechanical engineer suggests they check the transmission. The computer engineer suggests they pull over, turn the car off and start it up again.

I am reminded of it all too frequently when my laptop gets lost in itself and no key or combination, short of unplugging the battery, can bring it back. The joke is funny when heard in mixed company; everyone knowingly laughs. But as a technology professional, it’s not funny. It’s downright incriminating.

If some of this technology were an automobile, it would be banned from the road. It may not have rolled over and killed anyone, but it certainly has rolled over and died. It should come with a warning label, “Unsafe at any speed.” Look at how quickly and frequently global commerce gets disrupted using it.

Where is the outrage? Why do we accept a different standard of quality in software than we do in automobiles? Why do technology professionals think that a patch fixes the problem; or more correctly, that hundreds of patches fix the problem? Why do we allow a whole, separate industry to flourish, merely fixing security flaws?

We call them “bugs” as if somehow they are separate, evil creatures. But they’re not. They are problems with the intrinsic quality of our product and the way it is brought to market. With automobiles, we learned that it’s not always the driver, or how they drive.
Sometimes it’s the vehicle, and how it is built. At what point do we challenge software’s architecture and design and the quality control process that produces it?

There’s a lot of money involved. Frequently, the purchase price of software is less than the maintenance cost, which is less than the damage from use. Installing a patch requires testing everything integrated with it. Frequent patches mean a costly cycle of install, test, implement; repeat. But how much greater are the costs of lost reputation and lost privacy when a machine publicly fails or is hacked?

Why do consumers disproportionately bear this burden? Where are the lawsuits? When, as a matter of public policy, do we impose a greater warranty of merchantability on software suppliers?

Perhaps the Open Source movement is the industry’s way of getting to a better alternative. Low cost is often given as the reason for the move toward Open Source. But the desire for quality may be an equally powerful impetus. Here’s the key question: When Open Source software becomes as pervasive as proprietary software, will it be as vulnerable to “bugs”?

To the technologically illiterate, the picture must be incongruous. Our industry is taking the world on parade but the floats keep breaking down and the fumes are noxious. We must find the courage and wisdom to say, “Open the windows; the stench is unbearable.”

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