The distinction between a bug and a design flaw is vague. If a program causes an access violation this is certainly a fully qualified bug. What, however, if a program doesnot do what the programmer had intended, but without causing a crash? I think this is also a bug. Suppose a program does exactly what the programmer had in mind, but the behavior is not what a user expects. A developer could program that a simple ascii editor starts the first line with “We hope you like our editor”. This is not a bug, but a design flaw. If the program does exactly what the programmer does and it does what the user expects it should do, but the user wants it to do something else, we have the situation of a feature request.
But from the point of the user the difference between bug and design flaw is ambiguous. He doesnot know what the programmer intended while he is confronted with a surprising behavior. The programmer could even save himself by declaring a surprising aspect to be there by design, while if he would have been honest he would admit he made a mistake.
With this in mind when a user rates a new application he would not make a distinction between bugs and design flaws. For this reason when I make critical remarks about the functioning of software I will classify my remars either as reproting a design flaw (including plain bugs) or reporting a feature request.
