A number of years ago, I worked for a company that made modeling
software. I'm probably still bound by the confidentiality
agreement, so I'm gonna be careful here.
One day, one of the regular participants on the company mailing
list / customer forum wrote that when he ran standard-textbook-case
X through the model, he got result A instead of the expected result
B; he wanted to know what was up? After a brief flurry of checking
and testing, we discovered that a logic error in the software
sometimes resulted in an error in the math. The numbers were
usually not badly off, but occasionally there was a concatenation
of errors which led to a result which was qualitatively wrong.
The company president felt that we should just fix this in the next
software release ("all software has bugs") and keep it quiet. He
thought it would look bad if word got out that our software gave
incorrect results.
I felt that we had a responsibility to let all of our customers
know about the problem -- they were relying on the results of the
model in research papers, to decide what to do for development,
etc. This wasn't a bug which would lead to a crash, or wrong
colours showing up on a screen display, or something obvious; this
was a modeling system which sometimes reported numbers and results
that were somewhat wrong. The word was already out (on our mailing
list!) and I thought it was better to admit the problem, apologize,
and do what we could to rectify the problem, getting a reputation
as a company that dealt honestly with a mistake, than to risk
getting a reputation as a company that tried to cover things up.
And this was, dammit, a standard textbook calculation; if anything,
it was somewhat surprising that the problem hadn't been noticed
long before.
In the end, I got my way... sort of. There was a not-very-prominent
description of the problem on the company website, which got
more-hidden fairly quickly. There was a brief note, not
highlighted, in the newsletter sent to some customers. And of
course there was the mailing list. We made a software patch
available on the website (and mailed it on request), along with a
script which could be used to check a given model file to find out
if it would have been affected by the error. But IIRC, no effort
was made to contact even the customers who'd sent us contact
information on the software registration cards, let alone to seek
out our customers by other means.
This attitude was one of the things that helped push me to leave
the company.
A couple of years later, I discovered a couple more
somewhat-wrong-numbers bugs in another of that company's software
packages. When I reported the problem, I was told that they'd see
about fixing it in the next release.
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