NIST Estimates Sloppy Coding Costs $60 Billion/Year

An anonymous reader submits: "Computerworld is reporting on a government study just released that software bugs are costing the U.S. economy an estimated $59.5 billion each year, with more than half of the cost borne by end users and the remainder by developers and vendors. Better testing could allegedly cut that by one-third."

Comments

"Sloppy code" vs. market realities

[Infonaut]

It's rather obvious that the dominant paradigm in software development today is that of Microsoft. Their mantra has always been:

1) Get to market first, at all costs

2) Continue to add features, based on customer feedback

3) When the product gets good enough (after 4 or 5 major revisions) tout its reliability and stability

More about Microsoft's philosophy here: Microsoft Secrets. It's an old book, but still provides valuable insights into why the world of commercial software development has become more and more insane over the years.

Developers operate in an environment driven almost completely by market forces. Of course this begs the question - how much money would the economy loose if software were not driven by marketing and sales, and developers actually were given enough time to create virtually bug-free programs?

Re:"Sloppy code" vs. market realities

[Katravax]

Their mantra has always been:
1) Get to market first, at all costs

You're kidding, right? Did you just get into computers a year or two ago or something? Microsoft is hardly a first-to-market company:
NT? (OS/2 and Netware)
Word? (WordPerfect and Wordstar)
Excel? (Lotus 1,2,3)
FrontPage? (bought it from Vermeer, or bought Vermeer, I forget)
IE? (used pd code in first few revs)
PowerPoint? (Harvard Graphics)
Access? (wrote some, bought some)

For just about every MS product you can think of, they were second or third to market, not first. They have no need to be first to market.

2) Continue to add features, based on customer feedback

MS roadmaps out massive feature lists in advance, and implements and releases in cycles. It's not like they wait to see what customers are going to ask for. I attended a MS hoo-rah prior to the release of Office 95. Many of the features they listed like voice control and mapping, weren't included until much later releases. I'm not saying they don't implement based on customer feedback, but it's not like they don't think something through before an initial release.

3) When the product gets good enough (after 4 or 5 major revisions) tout its reliability and stability

No argument here. You're absolutely wrong on your first point, though.

Who are you trashing?

[GuyMannDude]

This article it typical alarmist FUD. No mention of how much money is saved each year by coders.

This world of perfection exists only in the minds of the pencil pushers at NIST.

(emphasis mine)

So are you saying the article is shit or the 307 page NIST report is shit? Or both? Yeah, there's no mention of how much money is saved by coders. That's because that wasn't part of the NIST study. If you had bothered to even skim the NIST report (the PDF is just a click away) you would have read on page ES-2:

The objective of this study is to investigate the economic impact of an inadequate infrastructure for software testing in the U.S.

Note that the objective of the NIST report is not "Software: benefit or liability".

In the real world, coders sometimes make mistakes because they are...human.

Just because software developers are human doesn't mean that they should be blind or ignorant of the very real costs borne by society because good testing procedures have not been instituted at most companies. NIST isn't saying "coders are crap". They're simply pointing out that software bugs are a serious problem. And then they back it up with 300+ pages of analysis.

GMD

The costs of sloppy coding

[jmorack]

Of coure we have sloppy coding. We have poor programmers for the same reason we have poor teachers, poor doctors, poor lawyers, poor businessmen. People who are only in it for the money.(teachers may be a bad example) They have no talent for the field, they just do it for the money.