I work for a web development company, and quite often, some of our projects come back from the client after being released, with small bugs.
This frustrates my boss as it means we must carry out development work to fix the issue, for which we are not getting paid for.
How can we prevent errors from ever occuring, or is this just something that should be taken into the initial cost?
If you aren't unit testing, try some of these excellent questions.
Released software will always contain some bugs, even the big companies like MS, Google and apple can't release without bugs. Ofc you can do lots of thing to prevent it, like unit testing, smoke testingen, stress testuing ect. ect., but there will always be bugs. thats as certain as rain when you'r on holiday in England.
Make sure you discuss stuff like this in the sell proces. For example 3 weeks aftercare(bugs fixed for free), after that the can buy maintaince hours
Our philosophy, time versus money applies to your circumstance as well. The more time that is spent on unit testing, the less likely it is that code will contain bugs after it is released. At the same time, the more time your spend unit testing the less profitable the code is.
We take a more cavalier approach. Our programmers test their own code, pass it off to a fellow programmer for testing, and then a final review and unit test is performed by a supervisor. If all three tests pass, the code is stamped complete and is passed on the end users.
Bugs are an inherent part of programming and must be anticipated as inevitable. No amount of testing can truly guarantee that code is 100% bug free.
Some good methods of avoiding writing bugs are found at this site.
http://sites.google.com/site/yacoset/Home/how-to-avoid-writing-bugs