Regress?

[Geoff Hart <ghart -at- videotron -dot- ca>]

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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