Bugs In Microsoft Technical Documentation Rising 146
snydeq writes "The number of bugs in technical documentation for Microsoft communication protocols continues to grow, according to court documents filed for ongoing antitrust oversight of the company in the US. Problems with the technical documentation — which includes 1,660 identified bugs as of Dec. 31, up from 1,196 bugs on Nov. 30 — remain the major complaint from lawyers representing the group of 19 states that joined the US Department of Justice's antitrust lawsuit against Microsoft. Lawyers for the states have complained repeatedly that technical documentation issues are opening faster than Microsoft can close them. Nearly 800 Microsoft employees are working on the more than 20,000 pages of technical documentation, according to the court documents filed Wednesday."
I didn't know you could get sued for bugs. (Score:4, Insightful)
"Bugs"? (Score:5, Insightful)
Do they mean documentation shows bugs with Microsoft's communication protocols or that the documentation is incomplete or erroneous?
When you have documentation (Score:5, Insightful)
Questions (Score:5, Insightful)
Are these old documents they've just now gotten around to reviewing, or are these bugs largely in new material?
If the latter, how does the bug per page ratio stack up with the past?
Depending on the answers to these questions, the quality of the documentation may actually be improving. It may be going down as the summary and article seem to imply, but we can't really say either with any confidence given the information provided.
More docs = more bugs (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:I didn't know you could get sued for bugs. (Score:1, Insightful)
Don't play the stupid card, it's pathetic.
They're not sued for bugs but for abusing their monopoly...
Re:When you have documentation (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I didn't know you could get sued for bugs. (Score:4, Insightful)
Don't play the stupid card, it's pathetic.
They're not sued for bugs but for abusing their monopoly...
whoosh
Re:Shocked, shocked that there is gambing going on (Score:5, Insightful)
Because documentation bugs, if any MS bugs, directly affect Linux users. Faulty documentation leads to faulty implementation of MS formats, I leave the rest to you.
Re:When you have documentation (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:To the editors (Score:5, Insightful)
The best remedy is to stop going to sites that don't mind annoying their users. Why reward them with traffic so they can go sell more ad space? We wouldn't need ad blockers if we only visited sites that are interested in keeping their readers happy. If they have no interest in giving me a positive experience then I have no interest in going there.
Now back to the topic: I don't think this is a delay tactic. I think it's incompetence stemming from a lack of interest in providing good documentation.
Re:"Bugs"? (Score:2, Insightful)
And there's the difference between 'open standards' and 'Microsoft being forced to open their standards': The open standards folks produce software that accurately reflects their documentation.
Re:When you have documentation (Score:4, Insightful)
In general, you are correct. But we're only talking about 20,000 pages. And there are 800 people on the task. And this is a legal requirement. I think there should be very very few mistakes in this documentation.
Re:I'm sympathetic (Score:4, Insightful)
And therein lies the problem. MS should have created a spec for their networking protocols BEFORE implementing them.
Re:When you have documentation (Score:3, Insightful)
You were modded Flamebait (and it may have to do with how you phrased your argument - leave out the swear word next time), but you make a good point.
One thing I *dislike* about many open source products (and I use a lot of them - I love open source in general) is that documentation can be very difficult to come by. And, there have been times I have gone into forums/IRC/etc for help only to hear, "Why don't you just read the source code?" I'm sorry - that's just not really an option for so many reasons I don't even know where to begin.
Re:When you have documentation (Score:5, Insightful)
In the DOS days, MS documentation was unusable. To do anything, one had to have a secondary unauthorized source. In the same timeframe, I also used DEC VMS Fortran and the IMSL library. I found the documentation of both of these very good. I never found a case where the DEC and official IMSL documentation did not match the behavior. Though the VMS Fotran documentation was just a sample, the VAX VMS documentation sat on a talbe 8 feet long. In a more modern case, I have used many libraries, such as the Boost C++ libraries, that put the MS documentation to shame.
In terms of OSS, external human readable documentation become much less of an issue. The source code is there. if something does not behave as expected, one can look at the code and figure out why. If one is really nice, since most OSS documentation is collaborative, one could even change the documentation to match the true behavior or add a not about unexpected behavior under certain conditions. If MS provided free and unfettered access to source code, so that at minimum any person who bought a copy of MS Visual Studio received a copy of the source code without having to sign any non disclosure agreements or the like, then I would agree. These complaints would be meaningless. After all, if you can't read code and figure out what is going on, then why are you programming in the first place?
But MS does not provide access to code to the common programmer. Nor does it have a history of provided reliable documentation to the common programmer. It does have a history of limiting what non-partner companies can do. So, all that is being asked is that it reliably documents it's API. To believe that it can't is to believe that we are basing our IT infrastructure on products from an incompetent company, so we choose to believe that it won't.
Re:When you have documentation (Score:4, Insightful)
Indeed. The system I worked on in the Navy had over a hundred volumes of documentation, which has been looked at by thousands of qualified eyes (between the contractors, DoD/Navy civilian employees, and sailors) over a period of a decade. Despite formal and informal reviews, an ongoing updating effort, and the documentation being closely studied and in daily use... Still we found bugs.
Virtually all of them were minor typographical errors, but still they were there.
Bug free documentation, I suspect, is like bug free programs - something attainable in theory but not in practice.
Re:To the editors (Score:3, Insightful)
You'd think, if Microsoft were a sensible company, they'd realise that not only might the engineers that made something (like a protocol or a library) not be there in the future, but they also might not remember every single detail of everything they've ever done for MS. Knowing this, it would follow they'd have some good internal documentation policies, and when courts say "give us the documentation", they could just hand over a great big pdf (or docx :P), and that would be the end of it. If this is the state of their real internal documentation, I'd hate to think what problems it would cause when trying to make new technologies backwards compatible. As much as I'd like to think that Linux is winning on it's own merit, and proprietary software is collapsing, that's really only a tiny bit of the story. Microsoft are suffering not because of Linux, but because of broad-sweeping incompetence like this. Let's hope those 5000 layoffs make the remaining employees a little more wary about their job security, and make them work to prove their value to Microsoft.