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The article mentions another Coding Horror one at the bottom [0]. I found this tidbit from there interesting: "In Code Complete, Steve McConnell cited two stud

The article mentions another Coding Horror one at the bottom [0]. I found this tidbit from there interesting: "In Code Complete, Steve McConnell cited two studies that proved it: "A pair of studies performed [in 1973 and 1984] found that, of total errors reported, roughly 95% are caused by programmers, 2% by systems software (the compiler and the operating system), 2% by some other software, and 1% by the hardware. Systems software and development tools are used by many more people today than they were in the 1970s and 1980s, and so my best guess is that, today, an even higher percentage of errors are the programmers' fault." I'd really like to learn how to track down hardware bugs, or mess with things like Christopher Domas does. [0] https://blog.codinghorror.com/the-first-rule-of-programming-its-always-your-fault/ https://blog.codinghorror.com/the-first-rule-of-programming-...

mark-r 9y ago
There's a story I heard that I can't track down anymore, about a game company that kept getting strange unreproducible errors from customers. They built a RAM test into their game and discovered that most of those errors were coming from bad RAM. 1% of a lot is a lot!
- zlynx 9y ago
  Doom 3 inadvertently did this for me one time. It loads data from pak/zip files and does a checksum verification. Which is how I discovered a defective RAM stick I'd used in a new system build.
huntie 9y ago
I wonder what the studies considered an error. Are syntax errors counted, or did it focus on runtime bugs? I imagine that syntax errors would really skew the results if they were counted.
- xelxebar 9y ago
  This is a good point. Methods matter. I tracked down the exact references: [0] A. R. Brown and W. A. Sampson, Program debugging: the prevention and cure of program errors. Computer Monographs, 18. 1973 [1] Thomas J. Ostrand and Elaine J. Weyuker, Collecting and categorizing software error data in an industrial environment. Journal of Systems and Software, Volume 4, Issue 4. 1984 I couldn't actually get a hold of [0]; however, [1] was easy to find, and it goes into great detail about it's categorization of "faults". In fact, the abstract explicitly mentions that it catogorizes and analyzes 173 faults. On page 7 (page 295 of journal), we finally get to your question: "Of these 171, 15 were attributed to clerical mistakes, such as incorrect typing or misunderstood handwriting." So 15/173, or about 8.7%, of the faults they found were of the kind you mention. Interestingly, from earlier on the same page, "... 12 represented compiler or operating system faults," so only 20% less frequent than "clerical errors". This paper also compares with a lot of other studies, so it's worth reading if you're interested. Thanks for asking a good question!

mark-r 9y ago

There's a story I heard that I can't track down anymore, about a game company that kept getting strange unreproducible errors from customers. They built a RAM test into their game and discovered that most of those errors were coming from bad RAM. 1% of a lot is a lot!

zlynx 9y ago
Doom 3 inadvertently did this for me one time. It loads data from pak/zip files and does a checksum verification. Which is how I discovered a defective RAM stick I'd used in a new system build.

huntie 9y ago

I wonder what the studies considered an error. Are syntax errors counted, or did it focus on runtime bugs? I imagine that syntax errors would really skew the results if they were counted.

xelxebar 9y ago
This is a good point. Methods matter. I tracked down the exact references: [0] A. R. Brown and W. A. Sampson, Program debugging: the prevention and cure of program errors. Computer Monographs, 18. 1973 [1] Thomas J. Ostrand and Elaine J. Weyuker, Collecting and categorizing software error data in an industrial environment. Journal of Systems and Software, Volume 4, Issue 4. 1984 I couldn't actually get a hold of [0]; however, [1] was easy to find, and it goes into great detail about it's categorization of "faults". In fact, the abstract explicitly mentions that it catogorizes and analyzes 173 faults. On page 7 (page 295 of journal), we finally get to your question: "Of these 171, 15 were attributed to clerical mistakes, such as incorrect typing or misunderstood handwriting." So 15/173, or about 8.7%, of the faults they found were of the kind you mention. Interestingly, from earlier on the same page, "... 12 represented compiler or operating system faults," so only 20% less frequent than "clerical errors". This paper also compares with a lot of other studies, so it's worth reading if you're interested. Thanks for asking a good question!