>> I see no reason for the software industry to continue with an attitude of “ship it” with known bugs.
>
>Even when the bugs will never show up in a production environment? There are known bugs in VFP that I can guarantee you'll never find. I can crash VFP7 in three lines of code, but I'll bet you never will be able to. But I can also crash my microwave and my cell phone (still working on crashing my DVD player). I'm a tester, it is my profession. I'll find stuff that no other user is likely to find.
>
>So do we spend resources to fix something that only a pathological tester can reproduce? No, the risk is too great. For every bug you fix, there's a 60% chance you'll introduce new bugs. Open 100 projects in the VFP IDE, close VFP and fire it up again. Oops, all 100 projects didn't open again. Do you fix that at the risk of introducing new, perhaps more evil bugs? I think not. Nobody in their right mind is going to open 100 projects at once. No customer has ever reported it, and I'm the first tester to find it, and then only by digging through the source code. So why risk introducing bugs that users will find?
>
>Any test team, whether Microsoft or not, will allow a product to go out the door with known bugs because it's a trade-off between the risk of fixing the bugs vs. the odds that a user will run into it. If a product team fixed every bug that that a competent test team found, any reasonable complex piece of software would never ship. We wouldn't have microwaves or cell phones, either. :-)

I'm glad to hear someone like you say this, because I agree that a zero-bug product is unrealistic. I'm not proud to say so in a forum such as this one, but our product will ship in the next couple of months with known bugs. Sure, we will fix all of the ones users are most likely to come across, but ones that occur in very limited situations will ship with the release. At some point, you have to say that some fixes can wait until after release. Shipping the product has to become a priority, or like you said, it will never happen. Although it may have not been accurate, I remember reading that Windows 2000 shipped with around 65,000 known bugs, just no "showstoppers". I think most will agree that it is a significantly better product than previous versions.