3 ms·

Innocent question: if nobody found those bugs, what value does it add to fix them?

• eithed 4y ago
  What will happen when people exploit the bugs that were not found?
• hansvm 4y ago
  - Bugs are often found and unreported, leaving the user with a general impression of janky software and damaging your word-of-mouth efforts. - Some bugs aren't triggered often but are still bad when they happen. Sorting in Python and Java/Android was broken for ages, but not in a way you'd hit often. - In keeping with the above point, failure rates are exponential in the complexity of your software in the presence of buggy components. Future changes and additions will be problematic on a buggy foundation. - Many bugs go unnoticed while still causing damage. You know that kind of "oh shit" moment when you compare the last year of payments in one database to another and find duplicates or missing records? You're not sure yet what went wrong, but _something_ definitely wrecked a lot of people's days. - Similarly with anything involving proper subnormal support, bit-accurate transcendentals, .... If you don't have a good idea what the result was supposed to look like and it was built on a numerical house of cards then you might get lucky most of the time, but some of your outputs are going to be subtly wrong in ways that definitely hurt the business and probably won't be picked up on for ages. And so on. Maybe it's not worth fixing the bugs in some piece of software (balancing constraints and all that), but there's definitely value to be had.