A bug is when…
Bugs are sometimes defined as when a program does anything that the user does not expect. However sometimes users expect some unreasonable things. So what is a bug? Well I definitely think that it is more than when it does something that the programmer doesn’t expect.
In that vein, sometimes bugs can be when the program does things that the programmer did intend.
All applications have a primary purpose. After that they have secondary purposes. And then many times there are aspects of applications that start to get in the way of the primary purpose. A good example of that can be found in a popular word processing application from Microsoft. Taking advantage of this application’s auto-correction feature, people can create a situation where typing in a common word will auto-correct it so a word that is not intended by the writer.
When this happens we may all laugh, but a secondary feature of the application, (auto-correction), is preventing the primary purpose, (composition), from being accomplished.
There are times in software development, both in user applications, and in back end scripting, when leveraging a secondary feature, subverts the primary purpose. When that primary purpose is a mission critical function, we can get that call in the middle of the night.
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