My neck is sore from so much head shaking over the Zune freeze problem. I would have hoped that the development teams at Microsoft would have held regular code reviews which should have caught a glaring error like this one. I understand why they may not have done so. It's quite hard to get people to review your code if company procedures don't demand it. This is especially true in consumer electronics where the schedules seem to be compressed to ridiculous levels.
So what do we learn from this public relations fiasco?
1) Code reviews should be mandatory, not optional.
2) Developers must do much better unit testing. In the past I've had coworkers criticize me because I insist on running functions under a debugger to force execution of tough to test code paths.
I'm always amazed that software engineers can take such a cavalier approach to verifying their code performs as expected. Then again I'm old and cranky. Hey you kids... get off my lawn! :-)
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