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microtodd writes:

Some of the worst moments of my day happen when I get an email or a call from a customer who has found a bug in my released software product. It's even worse when I'm on site for training and they find the bugs there. No matter how rigorously I QA/test, it seems inevitable that a customer will find a way to break the software within the first few minutes of using it.

The key, then, is how do you respond? David Cummings has some thoughts on how to handle these scenarios. What's interesting is that there's an idea that maybe not all bugs need to be fixed, at least not right away. This is counter to The Joel Test where Joel Spolsky feels you should fix all known bugs right away, even before adding new features. Does this make sense? Is it more important to get new features out the door sometimes than to have as bug-free software as possible?

I'm reminded of this story, where adding a feature before fixing bugs actually saved the project.