Shipping bug-free code is not impossible. I've done it twice, and it only requires two things:
- Make it right
- Stop
Shockingly, projects often have more trouble with #2 than #1. The techniques for writing bug-free code are well known. The techniques for finishing? Not so much.
This talk looks at two Java libraries that achieved bug-free status and stopped. We'll also look at a number of projects that haven't, and discuss the incentives that make project maintainers choose bugs over stability.
Bio: When not laboring in his secret identity of a mild-mannered software developer, Elliotte Rusty Harold lives in a secret mountaintop laboratory on a large island off the East Coast of the United States with his dog, Cream, and two cats, Sheldon and Neutrino.
He’s an avid birder and entomology enthusiast. His most recent books are Java Network Programming, 4th edition, and the JavaMail API, both from O’Reilly.
He's the creator of the XOM library for processing XML with Java, the current maintainer of the Jaxen XPath Engine for Java, and an Apache Maven committer.
