Posted: Sun Apr 23, 2006 9:00 pm Post subject: Bugs
Software Bugs
An error, especially in a program, that has been missed in testing. The story goes that the original bug was an insect that got itself cremated inside an electrical circuit in an early computer, causing it to fail (and I don't suppose the insect enjoyed it much, either). It took them ages to figure out what was causing the problem, and when they eventually found the bug the story passed into legend.
First Computer Bug
In 1945, Grace Murray Hopper was working on the Harvard University Mark II Aiken Relay Calculator (a primitive computer). On the 9th of September, 1945, when the machine was experiencing problems, an investigation showed that there was a moth trapped between the points of Relay #70, in Panel F. The operators removed the moth and affixed it to the log. The entry reads: "First actual case of bug being found."
The word went out that they had "debugged" the machine and the term "debugging a computer program" was born. Although Grace Hopper was always careful to admit that she was not there when it actually happened, it was one of her favorite stories.
Debugging is the process of locating and fixing errors (known as bugs), in a computer program, or hardware device. To debug a program or hardware device, you start with a known problem, isolate the source of the problem, and then fix it. When someone says they have debugged a program, or "removed the bugs" in a program, they imply that they have fixed the program, so that the bugs no longer exist in it. Debugging is a necessary process in almost any new software, or hardware development process, whether a commercial product, an enterprise, or personal application program. For complex products, debugging is done periodically throughout the development, and again during the customer beta test stages. Because most computer programs and many programmed hardware devices contain thousands of lines of code, almost any new product is likely to contain a few bugs. Invariably, the bugs in the functions that get the most use, are found and fixed first. An early version of a program that has lots of bugs is referred to as "buggy." Debugging tools help identify coding errors at various stages of development. Some programming language packages include a facility for checking the code for errors as it is being written.
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