Vincent Gable’s Blog

December 11, 2008

There are Worse Things Than Crashing

Filed under: Design,Programming | , ,
― Vincent Gable on December 11, 2008

Crashing is not the worst thing a program can do. Data-loss and corruption are worse bugs than crashing. I think this is generally accepted in theory, but I often hear developers say things like,

If there’s one behavior of your application that you should focus on eliminating, it’s the behavior of crashing. Above all other “nuisances,” this is the one that is absolutely unacceptable.1


And I certainly agree that crashing is unacceptable, and a high-priority bug. But it’s not the highest priority kind of bug.

For example, say your bank’s website crashes all the time. That sure sucks for everyone! People will be upset, some of them enough to take their business elsewhere. But if the website even occasionally moved the decimal point around when you sent money, the bank would be out of business faster than you could say suedfornegligence.

Even for software that isn’t used by banks, hospitals, nuclear reactors, etc., the basic principle is the same, it’s better to crash than vandalize people’s data.

As with any general rule, there are exceptions. It’s probably worse if an email program crashes than if it “corrupts” data by adding an extra space to the end of of a message. In fact, Mail could be doing this right now, and I wouldn’t know or care. (Outside of movie plot scenarios where evil CS 101 students are holding the city hostage, and I have 10 seconds to defuse the bomb by sending an email with a body containing the de-activation code and not a single extra character. Although to be fair, there’s probably a clause in Mail’s EULA saying it’s a violation of the terms of sale to use it to defuse thermonuclear weapons.)

But the threshold of “acceptable” corruption is vanishingly small. If about 1% of the time Mail made the subject-line of an email all lowercase, that is plausibly worse than a 1% chance of crashing. It’s not OK for the subject of a job-application email to be changed to “vincent gable, professional and detail-oreinted programmer“[sic] (and you know what they say about first impressions).

The Unthinkable

I think a lot of why crashes are thought the worst thing a program can do is, fortunately, crashes are the worst thing most programs will ever do. So they end up taking the #1 spot on the bug severity triage sheet.

Data-vandalization is orders of magnitude less common then crashing in shipping programs. And if you count crashes during development, that proportion shrinks dramatically. Every non-trival program has crashed at some point during the development process.

And a leading cause of data loss is programs crashing without saving something. Do you classify that as a data-loss bug or a crash? Well, the crash is the thing that needs to be fixed to solve the problem, so probably a crash.

Small wonder then that crashes are considered by some to be the worst kind of bug, even though erasing or corrupting someone’s data is worse. Most recently, I have been going by Wil Shipley’s bug triage priorities, which give highest priority to “Data-loss bugs”.


1 I don’t mean to call out Daniel Jalkut; his was just the first quote that jumped to mind. And for all I know he agrees with me, and classifies mauling a user’s data as something worse than a “nuisance”.

1 Comment »

  1. Yes, I would agree data mauling is the most unacceptable.

    To adapt the crashing metaphor, you could put up with a million car crashes as long as it didn’t hurt or kill you. It would be extremely, extremely annoying, but not as bad as a broken car radio that shocked and killed you.

    Comment by Daniel Jalkut — December 11, 2008 @ 5:40 pm

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