The application may experience a hard landing
October 8th, 2009 2 Comments
We all know what a crash is, right? Well, I’m not sure. Those of us who work with software are used to saying that an application crashed when what we mean is it stopped working in a sudden and/or ugly manner and was beyond all repair: time to go to Task Manager, kill off the process and start up the application again.
But I’m not convinced everybody would be sure what you meant if you referred to an application crashing. So today I was looking for an alternative to “crash” and I came across the following on the LA Times website:
3 injured as LAPD helicopter makes a 'hard landing'
A Los Angeles Police Department helicopter with three people aboard made a "hard landing" in Lancaster today.
Experiencing a “hard landing” is also an expression we’ve heard regularly over the past 12 months in relation to the economy, but I must admit I’d never stopped to think that what they really meant was a crash.
I didn’t have any luck finding a suitable “crash” alternative via Google, so I looked up the Microsoft Manual of Style where I found the following advice:
“Use fail for disks or stop responding for programs or the operating system. In content for software developers or information technology professionals, crash may be the best word in certain circumstances, but it is well worth avoiding whenever possible.”
So I asked the writer whose documentation I was reviewing to change “crash” to “stop responding”. But I’m not entirely sure. Maybe we should call a spade a spade and a crash a crash.
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October 9th, 2009 at 9:13 pm (#)
The problem with "crash" is that it is not very specific. If you post on a support forum that "the program crashed", the response is likely to be "What exactly happened? Did you get an error message, and if so what was it?" A program that stops responding has a different type of problem from a program that exits unexpectedly. I suggest describing the behavior that the user is likely to see, rather than a vague term like "crash".
October 30th, 2009 at 9:55 pm (#)
Hi Alistair,
In software testing land (when writing defect for example) there is a difference.
CRASH: When a program crashes you may or may not get an error message, but what you do get is a program no longer running. Like the helicopter!
NOT RESPONDING: In this case the program is still running, it be producing errors, but it is not responding to user stimulation. This would be a helicopter going round in circles out of the pilots control - but not splattered on the ground.
In performance testing you sometimes find a program that is not responding (to any more request/load) is actually busy processing what it can.
Stephen.
PS what's wrong with my .cx email address - you site wont accept it.