4 ms·

Is it obviously true though? More expensive, sure? But 100x? Is it not 50x? Or 300x? Without some actual measurements I'd want to put some very very big error

Is it obviously true though? More expensive, sure? But 100x? Is it not 50x? Or 300x? Without some actual measurements I'd want to put some very very big error bars on my feelings there!

laurent92 5y ago
Exactly: If bugs cost 50x more in production, but only bugs that are relevant for the core product are reported , then I’ve won 90% of the development time. That’s what I did for my startup (no tests, no 3-tier), and it was extremely valuable seeing all reports focus on a few areas, half of the reports being requests for improvement, extremely useful in determining 90% of the critical path and proving the ballpark of revenue that people would put into it, and since we can now hire, we’re now fully 3-tier with modern tech an all. Good management is judging where to put the team’s energy.
wongarsu 5y ago
I would be very surprised if there is a meaningful number without adding much more context. Some early stage startup might be able to fix a low impact bug in production at only 10x cost, but I wouldn't be surprised if the two bugs exhibited in the first test flight of goings Boing's Starliner crew capsule have cost them over a million times as much as fixing them earlier, with the retests, the massive timeline slip, and all the knock on effects from the delay that majorly benefited their most promising competitor
throwawayboise 5y ago
And it all depends on how you define "bug." Misallocating memory? Use after free? Off-by-one? Probably cheap to fix even in production. A misunderstood or missed requirement? Sure, that could be very expensive if it affects a data structure or some other interface with other systems that then also have to change. But that goes beyond what I normally think of as a "bug".
- AndrewDucker 5y ago
  That depends on how expensive it is to get your code into production, how many other dependencies need to move in lockstep, how much manual regression testing there is, etc. Fixing a ten-second bug on my PC might easily be 100x cheaper than organising a release.
IncRnd 5y ago
It is a case of drawing something to a large extension in order to demonstrate a point. This is a rhetorical device and people shouldn't read the number 100 as literal. We could go so far as to say that focusing on the number 100 is not seeing the forest for the trees. Even though there isn't a literal trees or forest, and there is no need to create a study to find the trees or the forest.

Is it obviously true though? More expensive, sure? But 100x? Is it not 50x? Or 300x? Without some actual measurements I'd want to put some very very big error bars on my feelings there!

laurent92 5y ago

Exactly: If bugs cost 50x more in production, but only bugs that are relevant for the core product are reported , then I’ve won 90% of the development time. That’s what I did for my startup (no tests, no 3-tier), and it was extremely valuable seeing all reports focus on a few areas, half of the reports being requests for improvement, extremely useful in determining 90% of the critical path and proving the ballpark of revenue that people would put into it, and since we can now hire, we’re now fully 3-tier with modern tech an all. Good management is judging where to put the team’s energy.

wongarsu 5y ago

I would be very surprised if there is a meaningful number without adding much more context. Some early stage startup might be able to fix a low impact bug in production at only 10x cost, but I wouldn't be surprised if the two bugs exhibited in the first test flight of goings Boing's Starliner crew capsule have cost them over a million times as much as fixing them earlier, with the retests, the massive timeline slip, and all the knock on effects from the delay that majorly benefited their most promising competitor

throwawayboise 5y ago

And it all depends on how you define "bug." Misallocating memory? Use after free? Off-by-one? Probably cheap to fix even in production. A misunderstood or missed requirement? Sure, that could be very expensive if it affects a data structure or some other interface with other systems that then also have to change. But that goes beyond what I normally think of as a "bug".

AndrewDucker 5y ago
That depends on how expensive it is to get your code into production, how many other dependencies need to move in lockstep, how much manual regression testing there is, etc. Fixing a ten-second bug on my PC might easily be 100x cheaper than organising a release.

IncRnd 5y ago

It is a case of drawing something to a large extension in order to demonstrate a point. This is a rhetorical device and people shouldn't read the number 100 as literal. We could go so far as to say that focusing on the number 100 is not seeing the forest for the trees. Even though there isn't a literal trees or forest, and there is no need to create a study to find the trees or the forest.