Well, if you read the whole Statesman article, you'll see that he's not just finding bugs. Being able to evaluate an EDA tool and to intelligently compare it to alternative products requires both broad and deep knowledge about this kind of tools. Impressive. 

Here are some excerpts from the original artice:

"We would ask what he liked and didn't like about it and he could explain it on a very high-end level," 

"He had done other things with other companies' tools, so we asked what about ours did you like better? What do they do better?" says Nagel, who plans to put Carson to work testing future software releases. "It's amazing; when you talk to him it's like you're talking to a regular guy doing design." 


This looks like child-labour...isn't that forbidden by law?

Come on now Nick - in Doc Spinola's day they used to dangle children out of the cave to distract sabretooth tigers....

It was more than a decade ago, but I once had the pleasure of sitting down with a piece of test industry software that cost my company about $250,000. It didn't work. It really was completely incapable of performing its primary function. Just poking around in the menus and functions that worked, I filled four pages with blatant and obvious bugs.

So, I'm not that impressed that an 8-year old could find plenty of bugs in software. What amazes me is that the tree-stumps-for-brains that write such software can't be bothered to weed out the bugs before they let anyone else see it. Have they no pride at all?