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

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.