What's in a word: Safety Signal and other Word Acrobatics
'Your son has had an accident'. I vividly recall the formulation delivered to me over the phone, at the office, by the polished voice at the other end of the wire. Scary stuff no parent wants to hear. Not even if the accident means that your four-year old pooed in his pants and the manicured staff at the private school across the road won't touch the " situation ". Or shall we say, the incident . The issue , maybe? Anyone who has worked in IT knows that testing is part of life and sh't happens. Not that we call it as such (unless we think there is no upper rank within hearing range). We used to call it problem , like in "problem report" and "problem solved". But one rainy day, someone, somewhere, must have decided this expression is, well, problematic, and the more precise term defect became popular. However, defect has a bad connotation (and possibly a smelly rhyme too, given the right typo); our programs are not supposed to have defec