The Economics of Perfect Software

An anonymous reader writes "This article takes the interesting perspective that leaving bugs in software is good mdash; little ones, at least. This quote is particularly insightful: 'How do you know whether a bug is big or little? Think about who's going to hit it, and how mad they'll be when they do. If a user who goes through three levels of menus, opens an advanced configuration window, checks three checkboxes, and hits the 'A' key gets a weird error message for his trouble, that's a little bug. It's buried deep, and when the user hits it, he says 'huh,' clicks a button, and then goes on his merry way. If your program crashes on launch for a common setup, though, that's a big bug. Lots of people will hit it, and they will all be pissed. ... The cost of fixing all the bugs in your program and then being sure you fixed them all is way too high compared to the cost of having a few users hit some bugs they won't care about."pa href="http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fdevelopers.slashdot.org% 2Fstory%2F10%2F03%2F28%2F167251%2FThe-Economics-of-Perfect-Software" target="_blank" title="Share on Facebook"img src="http://a.fsdn.com/sd/facebook_icon_large.png"/a a href="http://twitter.com/home?status=The+Economics+of+Perfect+Software%3A+h ttp%3A%2F%2Fbit.ly%2Fcb9W7N" target="_blank" title="Share on Twitter"img src="http://a.fsdn.com/sd/twitter_icon_large.png"/a/ppa href="http://developers.slashdot.org/story/10/03/28/167251/The-Economics-of-Perfect-Software?from=rss"Read more of this story/a at Slashdot./p pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/Ya_d7scC8SKIGSsE-BKGQW5o7z0/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/Ya_d7scC8SKIGSsE-BKGQW5o7z0/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/Ya_d7scC8SKIGSsE-BKGQW5o7z0/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/Ya_d7scC8SKIGSsE-BKGQW5o7z0/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Slashdot/slashdotDevelopers/~4/Fv9STsn2N50" height="1" width="1"/

More...