Assassin's Creed For PS3 Seeing Lock Ups

[NJ5]

konnichiwa said:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QlpdyvwGe-s Hurray!

That's great. Hot Coffee debacle revisited anyone? :P

For our members who don't have experience of software development, let me tell you some basic facts about how bugs and bug fixing work in decent software companies.

When someone in a development team (usually a tester) finds a bug in the product that they're working on, they are usually requested to assign two values to the bug - priority and severity. The severity of the bug is related to how bad the consequences of the bug are. Some game examples, in order of ascending severity:

- A bug which consists in an ambient sound not getting played in some situation would have low severity

- A bug which causes the weapons system to accidentally refire in some situation would have slightly higher severity

- A bug which makes it impossible to complete a mission would have quite high severity

- A bug which causes demons to fly out of the console owner's nose would probably be assigned with the highest severity level.

Then we have the bug priority. This is a more subjective value, which depends on the severity and on how frequent/expectable the error is. A bug with high severity would usually have high priority too, but that may not be the case if the bug only happens every Friday 13th when the moon is full and the user is wearing a tuxedo while playing the game with the console downloading 1000 files from the network at the same time. Conversely, a bug with low severity would usually have low priority too, but that may not be the case if the bug happens so often that it becomes annoying and screws the user experience. All in all, assigning bug priorities is a matter of common sense and experience in software testing.

As the name says, the bug priority value is what the developers use to prioritize their work. Usually they'd start to fix bugs with highest priority level towards the ones lower in the list. If there's no time to fix some low priority bugs, the product can be shipped. However the product can never be shipped with bugs which, whether detected or not, have or would have high severity and high priority. If a game gets shipped with such a bug, it means that either the development team sucks, or the game was rushed to the market.