3 ms·

This is an oversimplification of the problem. Nobody is interested in the cost of "a bug", but their set of bugs. The cost is not just salary, it's also "missed

This is an oversimplification of the problem. Nobody is interested in the cost of "a bug", but their set of bugs. The cost is not just salary, it's also "missed sales". It may be the one bug, otherwise harmless, that shifts the opinion of a major decision maker. It may be the bug that causes some amount of users to finally look elsewhere, already being frustrated from previous bugs. It may be the bug that triggers a disgruntled user to write a rant on your product that ends up as a top google search result.

db48x 5y ago
Direct costs are all anyone means when they say that “bugs are 100× more expensive to fix in production”. There’s nothing in that statement about indirect or reputational costs, just the cost to fix. The factors you mention all exist, but they are irrelevant to the cost of fixing a bug. They are very relevant to the cost of _failing_ to fix a bug. What is relevant is your definition of the various stages of development. The numbers that are the source of the “100×” figure are from the development of an anti–ballistic missile system from the sixties or seventies. They would have been programming in assembler (thus the “27 lines of code patched per change” is not unusual). Finding and fixing a bug in the software after you’ve built all the missiles and shipped them to every ballistic missile base in the US could indeed be very expensive! But if your release process is just copying the new code to a server (or even a fleet of servers) and restarting some services, then it’s not expensive at all. Most of us have a very different idea of what “releasing” the software means than the folks on this project had. https://gist.github.com/Morendil/f9c2e9f3f450d3a76de8aeee7cf2bd00 https://gist.github.com/Morendil/f9c2e9f3f450d3a76de8aeee7cf...

3 ms·

This is an oversimplification of the problem. Nobody is interested in the cost of "a bug", but their set of bugs. The cost is not just salary, it's also "missed

by incrudible 5y ago

db48x 5y ago
Direct costs are all anyone means when they say that “bugs are 100× more expensive to fix in production”. There’s nothing in that statement about indirect or reputational costs, just the cost to fix. The factors you mention all exist, but they are irrelevant to the cost of fixing a bug. They are very relevant to the cost of _failing_ to fix a bug. What is relevant is your definition of the various stages of development. The numbers that are the source of the “100×” figure are from the development of an anti–ballistic missile system from the sixties or seventies. They would have been programming in assembler (thus the “27 lines of code patched per change” is not unusual). Finding and fixing a bug in the software after you’ve built all the missiles and shipped them to every ballistic missile base in the US could indeed be very expensive! But if your release process is just copying the new code to a server (or even a fleet of servers) and restarting some services, then it’s not expensive at all. Most of us have a very different idea of what “releasing” the software means than the folks on this project had. https://gist.github.com/Morendil/f9c2e9f3f450d3a76de8aeee7cf2bd00 https://gist.github.com/Morendil/f9c2e9f3f450d3a76de8aeee7cf...