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I am writing an internship report and I wonder if I may use the adjective buggy. I mean, if a computer program has lot of bugs, is it correct to say that the program is buggy?

Esoteric Screen Name
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2 Answers2

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It depends on the formality of your report, (though in my experience reports are formal).

Formal I would use 'The program has multiple bugs'

Informal That's when it would be ok to say 'the program is buggy'

SomeAmbigiousUserName
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Yes, buggy is an adjective in common use in that sense, and Thomas Edison talked about bugs in as bugbears or "little faults and difficulties" in a letter almost 150 years ago in 1878.

It is more a conversational term, and would be used as a qualitative descriptor. Often reports look for greater precision, and quantitative descriptions, such as rates.

Code defects is a more formal term, and "defects per 1,000 non-comment lines of source code" is a relatively common way of quantifying the bugginess of the software.

Euan M
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  • Is bugginess a valid word? google doesn't know it – Suncatcher Jan 05 '19 at 01:38
  • Merriam-Webster does know it. How did I find out? Google told me.
    https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/bugginess     – Euan M Feb 04 '19 at 01:14
  • Well this isn't really useful because "code defect" is a noun and -as you point out- "buggy" is an adjective. So "defective" is the more appropriate substitute, but it's actually more vague. "Defective code" could mean code that is very slow, or that it doesn't do a good job qualitatively but has no logical/syntax errors in it. – Elliott Jun 28 '20 at 10:01
  • Personally I'm writing a report that's informal enough that I think that "bug" is okay, but "buggy" is just too informal. I discuss bugs too much in my report to write "code defect" every time. I could define some new word for "bug" just for the sake of formality, but I hate unnecessary formality. The use-case I have is "[...] makes it more likely that buggy programs will crash", which can be awkwardly rearranged to "[...] makes it more likely that a program will crash if it contains some bugs". – Elliott Jun 28 '20 at 10:01