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This is an example of why "average" is not a good statistic for long-tailed distributions. What does it mean that Apple took 69 days, or Microsoft 83? Does th
by fastaguy88 5y ago
This is an example of why "average" is not a good statistic for long-tailed distributions. What does it mean that Apple took 69 days, or Microsoft 83? Does that mean that 90% of the bugs were fixed in 2 weeks, but 10% took months (or years)? Or were half fixed in a month, but the remainder took 3 months or more?
A much more useful number would be the median. When were half the bugs fixed? And it would be nice to know about the slowest 10%.
- tedunangst 5y agoI think you want to look at cumulative time. If, hypothetically, linux fixes one bug in one day for 365 days, and windows fixes one bug in ten days one time, is linux 10x better?
- fastaguy88 5y agoThe problem with any of these measures is that we do not know how severe the bugs are. But you are certainly correct, average (or median) time does not tell us how many bugs were fixed.
- thetallstick 5y agoIt’s not in the linked article but there’s significant more information from the source: https://googleprojectzero.blogspot.com/2022/02/a-walk-through-project-zero-metrics.html?m=1 https://googleprojectzero.blogspot.com/2022/02/a-walk-throug...