27 January 2004

Extreme Programming

Continuing with my rover obsession, today's news is that people on Earth have recreated the problem on Spirit and are working on a patch to be uploaded to both rovers ASAP. The forecast for Spirit is good: NASA now thinks it will be fully functional again within a few days. The problem was evidently due to an out of control filesystem hosing the flash memory.



My question is this: "How does the dude who wrote the code with the bug feel?" I feel pretty bad when my software has a bug and somebody working at another university has to send me email asking about some kooky result he got, and I'm occasionally stricken with panic at the thought that somebody could've published flawed data generated by my software. What about discovering that bug when the two platforms running the app are 100 million miles away?



No comments: