High Quality Defect - Do Not Fix

Jon Bach recently blogged about his experiences with High School students and how he used the infamous bug in Notepad to get their attention

If you type "this app can break" save and close the file, then reopen it, it comes back as rectangles.

"Where's my data?" I demanded, role playing an irate user.


He could also have typed in "Bush hid the facts" or any number of phrases

The defect goes back a long way - Jon mentions it in a 2007 newsletter, Shrini Kulkarni was so impressed when he read an interview where Jon mentioned in that he had to write a blog post on it - and here I am doing the same.

Not just testers that know about it - even bodybuilders were talking about it.

If you haven't heard of this defect then here is one of the many sites that explains it

Now if we were to take the famous Weinberg quote - "Quality is value to some person" then this is a high quality defect ! It provides training material, opportunities for the MS bashers to vent and something for bodybuilders to talk about after they finished their iron pumping.

Has it become a feature and not a bug ?