How Many Bugs Does Autofill Cause?

I imagine that’s what happened here: Programmer slip-up produces critical bug, Microsoft admits:

“Look at the two array references to ValidateRoutines[] near the end,” said Michael Howard, principal security program manager in Microsoft’s security engineering and communications group, referring to a code snippet he showed in a post to the Security Development Lifecycle (SDL) blog. “The array index to both is the wrong variable: pHeader->Command should be pWI->Command.”

One can imagine that developer, cranking along bopping his head to some Shakira, coming to the place to insert a variable name in the code, typing a couple letters and then letting the IDE autofill the wrong variable name.  A code review could catch that, I suppose, if you were diligent enough, but who has time for code reviews when there are deadlines approaching and no time to squander on anything but Rock Band Beatles in the lounge?

This entry was posted on Monday, October 19th, 2009 at 12:01 pm by The Director and is filed under Failed applications. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

One Response to “How Many Bugs Does Autofill Cause?”

  1. angelweave Says:
    October 23rd, 2009 at 3:05 pm

    Hmm – I’ve never seen an IDE that autofills VARIABLES. Properties and methods and stuff on an object, yes. But variables, no. But then again, we all know I’m a coding dinosaur and like it that way.

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