What do you call it when the spec is wrong? Like clearly actually wrong, such as when someone copied a paragraph from one CRUD-describing page to the next and forgot to change the word "thing1" to "thing2" in the delete description.
Because I'd call that a bug. A spec bug, but a bug. It's no feature request to make the code based on the newer page delete thing2 rather than thing1, it's fixing a defect
Ya, I would like a word for this as well. I naturally refer to this category of error as bug, but this occasionally leads to significant conflict with others at work. I now default to calling _almost everything_ a feature request, which is obviously dumb but less likely to get me into trouble. If there is a better word for "it does exactly what we planned, but what we planned was wrong" I would love to adopt it.
I reported such a bug to some software my company uses (Tempo). Vendor proceeds to call it a feature request because the software successfully fails to show public information (visible in the UI, but HTTP 403 in the API unless you're an admin).
Instead of changing one word in the code that defines the access level required for this GET call, it gets triaged as not being a bug, put on a backlog, and we never heard from it again obviously
A spec bug is just as bad as a code bug! Declaring a system free of defects because it matches the spec is sneaky sleight-of-hand that ignores the costs of having a spec.
The actual testing value is the difference between the cost of writing and maintaining the code, and the cost of writing and maintaining the spec.
If the spec is similar in complexity to the code itself, then bugs in the spec are just as likely as bugs in the code, thus verification to spec has gained you nothing (and probably cost you a lot).
Most of the software I've built doesn't have "a spec.", but let me zoom in on specs. around streaming media. MPEG DASH, CMAF or even the base media file format (ISO/IEC 14496-12) at times can be pretty vague. In practice, this frequently turns up in actual interoperability issues where it's pretty difficult to point out which of two products is according to spec and which one has a bug.
So yes, I totally agree with GP and would actually go further: a phrase like "we found all the bugs in the database" is nonsense and makes the article less credible.
Issues around business logic are not failures of the system, the system worked to spec, the spec was not comprehensive enough and now we iterate.