Much of today's software is built and updated in a slapdash process. Programmers give life to cool new features in quick-and-dirty code, throw the code at a computer to see whether the program runs, and excise the worst bugs, one by one, until the program works well enough to release.

Naturally, many errors evade this kind of testing, and those that remain can create both minor annoyances and such major inconveniences as late January's worldwide Internet slowdown, the work of a self-replicating "worm" called Slammer that exploited a programming flaw in Microsoft's SQL Server software.

That laissez-faire design philosophy is coming under fire. Sun Microsystems, Microsoft, and IBM are all plotting ways to revolutionize the practice of software engineering. Although their strategies differ, the efforts are all geared toward saving time, reducing development costs, sparing programmers the more mind-numbing aspects of software debugging, and-most important for consumers and business users-producing software that works well the first time it's released.

"Our challenge is to get our software to the point that people expect it to work instead of expecting it to fail," says Jim Larus, leader of a software quality project at Microsoft Research in Redmond, WA.