(Note, as with everything this is just my opinion and not Adobe’s opinion =)

I think it’s accepted as a fact of life that you’ll never be able to find and fix all bugs before shipping large software. Having said that, the teams I work with and observe are certainly interested in trying to find and fix bugs as early as possible in the development process as possible — it’s in everyone’s best interest to have fewer bugs in software.

Here are a few examples I’ve seen around Adobe, trying to improve the situation:

- About a month and a half ago I was at an engineering conference held by Adobe for Adobe engineers (and others in engineering groups). One of the keynote presentations talked about improvements and changes that they want to make in quality engineering — a specific new program that’s being implemented team by team presumably across the entire company. They shared some real-world research results about number of bugs found, earlier in product cycles, and the benefits of that (easier to fix, cheaper, less time, etc.). While I don’t know all the details, I do know that much of what was talked about is in Watts Humphrey’s Team Software Process.

- The open sourcing of Flex SDK and the open Flex bugbase. Obviously there are other reasons for open source and open bugbases, but one reason is so that people can file bugs (real bugs, not just “enhancement requests”). Certainly the more people who can see the source code sooner (open source) and inform Adobe of bugs (open bugbase) the more bugs will be found, earlier in the product cycle.

- Teams are adopting new development methodologies that are designed to facilitate finding and fixing bugs early in the cycle. At some point during the 1.0 cycle the AIR team starting adopting some Agile development processes such as daily “standing” meetings. For Flex 4, the Flex team has adopted the Scrum methodology. (And they aren’t the first Adobe teams to do so — I believe the Soundbooth team used Scrum for their 1.0 development, and has been evangelizing it to other teams since.)

I won’t claim that any of these things are a “magic bullet”, but I certainly believe that Adobe’s engineering teams are not just resting on their laurels, and they are trying to improve the quality of the software they deliver.

Perfect apps? They probably don’t exist. Here, Paul Robertson of the Adobe AIR team has some first-month thoughts on the meaning of “release version”: “So what does ‘release quality’ software really mean? Well, it means that it doesn’t have any …