Yesterday I was debugging some things in R trying to get a popular Flow Cytometry tool to work on our data. After a few hours of digging into the package I discovered that our data was hitting an edge case, and it seems like the algorithm wouldn't work correctly under certain circumstances.
This bug is not neccessarily the most significant issue, but I'm confident that it has occurred for other users before me, perhaps in a more insidious and less obvious way.
Given that since this tool was released, literature has been published that utiltised it, how does the profession handle the discovery of bugs in these widely used packages?
I'm sure that given the piecemeal nature of a lot of the libraries out there, this is going to happen in a much more significant way at some point (i.e. invalidating a large number of published results)
For some context I'm a programmer who's been working across various other parts of software development, and is quite new to Bioinformatics.