Regress?

Subject: Regress?
From: Geoff Hart <ghart -at- videotron -dot- ca>
To: TECHWR-L <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com>, obair <obair81 -at- comcast -dot- net>
Date: Tue, 27 Jun 2006 09:33:01 -0400

Paul wondered: <<Could someone tell me what QA people mean when they say that a bug has been regressed?>>

Probably they mean that the solution to the bug has passed safely through "regression testing"--that is, that fixing the problem hasn't introduced a whole slew of new problems. The etymology seems to be that regress is being used in the sense of "moving backwards rather than forwards." See, for example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regression_testing

You'd think that after 40+ years of learning how to program computers this wouldn't be an issue, and that programmers would have learned (among other things) the difference between local and global variables and local and global memory allocation, but apparently you'd be wrong.

I'm told by a credible but not unassailable source that this is why Microsoft hasn't made any effort to fix the autonumbering bug in Word: the underlying code that defines the data structures used to store the information in a document is so deeply elegant (that would be "seemingly cool but deeply flawed" in normal English) that fixing it would be like pulling out the main load-bearing card in a house of cards. You might still have a house left over when you're done, but more likely...

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Geoff Hart ghart -at- videotron -dot- ca
(try geoffhart -at- mac -dot- com if you don't get a reply)
www.geoff-hart.com
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Follow-Ups:

References:
regress: From: obair

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