It Crashes
Any software developer will be able to tell tales of bug reports that don’t give enough information to reproduce the problem. My all-time favourite said just this: “When you take off from the aircraft carrier in the F4 Phantom, it crashes.” Not an unusual scenario - a complex flight-sim written entirely in 80×86 assembler tends to either work perfectly, or crash.
Since it was back in the days before internets, emails and bug databases, this list that included this particular bug report arrived, as was customary, by trans-Atlantic fax. What with timezone differences and costs of international calls in those days, the best course of action was to try and find the problem given the limited information.
After much testing and poring over the rendering code, the flight logic code, the cockpit code and anything else that could possibly be involved, we were no nearer a solution and finally had to give in and enter the dreaded ‘request more information’ cycle. How reproducible is this problem? “It happens every time.” Every time? We’ve done this hundreds of times, it never crashes here. Try it on a different machine? Cockpit view? External view? Try it in VGA mode? Turn the sound off? “Nope, no matter what, it always crashes.”
Eventually it turned out that the software wasn’t crashing at all. The plane was crashing, straight off the end of the carrier deck and into the sea. The resolution to the ‘bug’? Don’t attempt a short take-off with the air brake on.