|
|
|
|
|
|
by TameAntelope
1891 days ago
|
|
|
The chart in this article is not based on any hard data (I know that offhand, it's a very popular chart), and the concepts it's trying to illustrate are baed on a study from the 80s and on languages like COBOL and FORTRAN, where compile times were very long and changes were difficult. I believe this specific study was debunked, though again I am having trouble finding anything specific on this. Apologies! Very little in software engineering continues to reflect the environment when this idea was originally created. The argument isn't really, "Do bugs cost more in production?", the argument is really, "Do they cost as much as this article's chart states directly?" and I believe the answer is a firm, "We don't know, but likely not, given how different from modern reality the assumptions are." If you're operating your software team as if bugs in production cost 50x-200x more than bugs caught during development, you're probably not operating your software team with a firm anchoring in reality, considering how thin the actual evidence is to support this notion. |
|
|
Again, this depends very much on what type of software you're working on. I've worked on systems where you probably need at least one extra zero, because the cost of pulling some equipment out of service once deployed could be devastating, and it wasn't the kind of equipment where you just have a couple of hot spares available in case something fails. I expect the people working on systems where really serious harm could result from a bug, the kind that can't be reversed because someone got hurt or something got physically destroyed, probably have much better war stories than me.
That said, I agree that development processes today are often very different to the ones we mostly followed a few decades ago, and I agree that dubious supporting data and quasi-statistical charts should be challenged. I haven't come across that particular chart before that I recall, and assuming it's a faithful reflection of the original source material, I'm slightly surprised that a well-known researcher like Capers Jones was behind it. It's definitely not the only argument for the basic idea that fixing bugs later can be much more expensive.