Two thoughts: * you only get to combine probabilities that way if the individual trials are independent. Debugging does not usually work that way - if I'm look

Two thoughts: * you only get to combine probabilities that way if the individual trials are independent. Debugging does not usually work that way - if I'm looking for the same bug as you, I'm likely to try many of the same things. Unless, of course, your development team is using a stochastic debugging process, in which case you've got... other problems. * I read the analogy as more about the challenges of inherently-serial processes (must complete A and B before C) and the individualized nature of software creation. For a counterexample, note that other "building" processes are parallelizable and standardized; it takes quite a long time to turn bauxite, sand, and rubber into a car, but the intermediate steps are not specific to the final product.