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How To Prove Code Review is Important

The infamous Zune 30GB failures were traced to a leapyear issue, and apparently they use some code we can see in the Freescale codebase. Take a look at the following sample of code, which determines the year from the day number (counting from January 1, 1980). I don't know about you, but the infinite loop is immediately obvious. On a leapyear, the main loop continues when days = 366 and the incrementing is never reached, because days > 366 fails.

Am I naive to think that even a casual code review would have caught this in a moment?

year = ORIGINYEAR; /* = 1980 */
while (days > 365) {
     if (IsLeapYear(year))
     {
         if (days > 366)
         {
             days -= 366;
             year += 1;
         }
     }
     else
     {
         days -= 365;
         year += 1;
     }
}


UPDATE: Fixed formatting issues. It looked fine when I posted it, honest!
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Comments

fumanchu said…
My best guess: the original author missed it because the 'else' block was indented to the same level as the inner 'if' at some point. I'd give good odds a reviewer would have missed it too.

Now a test--that would have caught it easily. Or a language without curly braces.
12:31 PM
Anonymous said…
How about adding some carriage returns so I can read it.
2:03 PM
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