[Note: I posted the following on my work team's blog earlier today. I started off with only 7 ways at noon, but came up with 5 more by the end of the day.]
Spelling errors are a simple and often humorous form of error that seems to be popular for introducing the topic of production errors. However I find that spelling errors and software errors differ in some very important ways.
The following is my own list of important differences between software errors and spelling errors.
- Software errors are usually dynamic (the software does something wrong) while spelling errors are always static (the spelling is wrong).
- Spelling is unambiguous: either a word is in the dictionary, or it is not.
- Spelling errors are trivial to reproduce.
- Once identified, spelling errors are usually easy to recognize as such.
- If different stakeholders disagree on the spelling of a word, you can resolve the conflict by going to the dictionary.
- You can usually ignore requests from a customer to spell a word incorrectly (after politely referring them to a dictionary, of course).
- The cost of correcting a spelling error in a draft document does not increase with the amount of time it spent there.
- After carefully correcting a spelling error, you can be supremely confident that the spelling of that one word is now correct.
- Repeated misspellings of the same word can be easily corrected with the "Replace All" word processor feature.
- It is easy to correct a spelling error without creating more spelling errors.
- Correcting a single spelling error does not cause a collection of seemingly unrelated spelling errors to vanish without a trace.
- There are many spell checking programs available to detect all your spelling errors for you. Software defect detection, however, is an undecidable problem: there cannot ever exist a program that will detect all software defects.
Can you think of any others? Post them in the comments!
P.S. This blog post has been certified by a spell checker as 100% free of spelling errors :-)
