There's always a tradeoff between the cost of finding a defect before shipping and the cost of finding it after shipping.

NASA and nuclear power stations have a rather high cost to remediate some software defects, so it makes sense to work much harder to find them earlier. Same thing with anything life safety critical. You can't patch a bug and uncrash your space probe, or unmeltdown your powerplant, or unkill your patient. But a lot of other stuff is ok; yeah, it's not great if music players don't work on Jan 1 of years after a leap year, but you'll have four years for the product to decline into irrelevancy before that happens again (or to get patches out, if Zune had market fit)

It still holds true - their standards to reach the level of "happy" will clearly be more stringent than others. So will hospitals or any customer whose work can make a life or death difference. But they still care about the result of the product, and they set the standard you need to hit.

You are right. Thank you for being kind and constructive even though I was snarky and did not fully get that you in fact did not exclude these cases.

It's funny you say that because the next thing I pictured was Homer Simpson and realized that thousands of brilliant engineers from all walks of life may eventually have all their effort wasted because someone left their station for donut day.

Good engineering means building systems that can survive Homer Simpson.

Do you really think NASA software is bug free?

That was not implied. The issue was bug tolerance being measured by cutomer happiness, which is an ephemeral metric and silly concept in many industries.

NASA's bug tolerance is clearly measured by customer happiness too. Their customers are very unhappy if rockets blow up all the time (especially with people on board), therefore they have a very low bug tolerance.

The idea that NASAs goals and limitations is equated with happiness is ridiculously reductive.

> Do you really think NASA software is bug free?

Ignoring the fact you are arguing in bad faith is not compelling

GL with whatever.