Thursday, January 08, 2009

An Excellent Analysis of the Zune 30 GB Leap Year Bug

It is unlikely that any of our regular readers is a Zune owner, but I have found the revelation and analysis of the bug in Zune 30 GB players that locked it up for all of New Years Eve to be fascinating. If you missed the original analysis, basically there was a bug in the year calculation function that runs just before the end of the boot cycle which ended up in an infinite loop on the last day of a leap year.

This article is a great read on the bug, and illustrates why QA is so important and how even now Software Engineering is an art. There are many solutions, but few which are both bug-free and elegant.

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