Friday, June 27, 2008

Bug, Error or Defect?

A few days ago I came across this article:
www.sei.cmu.edu/news-at-sei/columns/watts_new/1999/March/watts-mar99.htm

It got me thinking... I usually use the word "bug" to referr to any unexpected behavior in the software. However, after reading this article, I started to say "defect" instead of "bug".

It also made me remember a Software Quality Assurance course I took during my Master's degree. In the course book the differences between defect, error, fault and some other words I don't really remember was explained. Back then -and still- I thought that there was no sense in using different words for different situations. In my opinion, problems during compilation, testing, deployment... all can be called defects. Using a word for each situation makes it confusing.

Finally, it is interesting how the name of the software changes our habits... for example, I used to say "bug" because I am used to using BugNET as a defect tracking system. Or when I say "googled" a word or "photoshop" an image.

Wednesday, June 18, 2008

VS2005 and wchar_t

While upgrading a VS2003 solution to VS2005, I received the following error:

Error 29 error LNK2028: unresolved token (0A001D22) "public: void __thiscall osgText::TextBase::setText(unsigned short const *)" (?setText@TextBase@osgText@@$$FQAEXPBG@Z) referenced in function "private: class osg::Node * __thiscall XXX::YY::ZZZ::FFF::WWWW(class XXX::YY::ZZZ::FFF::CCC &,class osg::Vec4f const &)" (?KKKKK@TTTTT@CCCCC@YY@XXX@@$$FAAEPAVNode@osg@@AAVGGGGG@234@ABVVec4f@6@@Z) RRRRRR.obj

My first thought was to make sure I had the correct version of the OSG libraries. They were OK, so then I googled some keywords of the error message and came across something interesting. VS has an option in Tools->Options that is "Treat wchar_t as built in type". My default value was false, so I set it to "Yes" and rebuilt the libraries. It worked!