"Characterizing problems" reads to me like "discovering bugs," particularly given that he specifically mentions having lots of beta users.
Re:The Cathedral and the Bazaar (1999)
by doctor_eval on Sunday May 14, 2023 @08:41PM
(#35942723)
As I mention upthread, a lot of the talk at the time was about overall quality of the software. So an interpretation that the total number of bugs would be reduced is well aligned with this outlook.
If the objective is just to fix bugs that have been found, well, that doesn't really feed into this narrative. Also, ESR was making a very large number of claims about the efficacy of OSS, and limiting the scope to bugs already discovered would not really align with the rest of the goings-on at the time.
The longer paragraph doesn't seem to contradict the notion either. My impression (based on the "How Many Eyeballs Tame Complexity" chapter) is that Raymond thought that "debugging" means "fixing bugs".
If I were criticising this part of essay, I'd say the main weakness is that the things Raymond thought of as "taming complexity" weren't really addressing the hard problem of reducing the number of bugs.