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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."
It originally only cost the economy $6 a year, but there was an unfortunate rounding error in the code that figured out the total cost...
Yes, sloppy coding has great costs, but blaming the coding for the state of software engineering is like blaming the rubber O-ring for the Space Shuttle disaster, when everyone knows that it was an organizational issue that prevented the knowledge of the critical temperature from getting out of engineering and into management. Most of the software industry (and I include system analysts, architects, and customers who don't know what they want and won't let us help them determine it) is responsible for:
It doesn't matter how well you code, if the contract requires the coder to deliver an unusable product then that'll be what's delivered.
Wow. They have said the same thing about illegal drug usage and goofing off at work. I just hope that the politicians and the WSPTOTC (Won't Someone Please Think of the Children) don't create a crazy War on Sloppy Coders and start busting down doors, pointing automatic weapons at coders and shouting "You with the undocumented line of code! Hands off the KB or I shoot!" If I see a TV commercial where some guy with a pocket protector laments "I killed a judge with my sloppy coding", then I am moving to another planet.
This article it typical alarmist FUD. No mention of how much money is saved each year by coders. The sloppiness comes with the territory: unrealistic deadlines, sloppy documentation, buggy interfaces, clueless management, and a changing world. This world of perfection exists only in the minds of the pencil pushers at NIST. In the real world, coders sometimes make mistakes because they are...human.
"What is the sound of one belly slapping?"
Here's a quick quote:
:^)
[There are very few markets where "buyers are willing to accept products that they know are going to malfunction," said Gregory Tassey, the NIST senior economist who headed the study. "But software is at the extreme end, in terms of errors or bugs that are in the typical product when it is sold."]
Need I remind anyone of the Pinto? How about the recalls we've had recently with everything from tires to airbags? Even if the failures aren't that harsh, who hasn't heard a mechanic say, "Welp, the '89 model uses a Peugeot transmission. They're not exactly, um, the best." Having spent some time under a few vehicles, let me assure you the mechanics aren't always lying.
So there's at least one market where one hardly hits perfection with version 1.0.
Of course software has bugs, of course bugs take time to fix or for a user to work around. The trick is that no software will ever be released bug free that does much more than print "Hello World!" to the console. It's not how much time bugs cost; bugs are a fact of life. The question is whether fixing those bugs would be worth the time it'd take to get them out. With a quick angry glance at the IIS team, often it isn't.
It's all 0s and 1s. Or it's not.
Money payed to programmers to fix bugs is money that isn't being used more productively somewhere else.
Ce qu'on voit et ce qu'on ne voit pas
Ryan T. Sammartino
"Ancora imparo"
So does this $60 billion offset the amount of money that the software industry claims they lose to software pirates?
How much money do software pirates lose by using illegal copies of sloppily coded software?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
How much money do MY bugs cost? Do fatal bugs in my code actually RETURN productivity to the workforce? Do bugs in my code actually make money for the US economy?
I skimmed through the article and I didn't see any place where it said how much it would cost to actually produce bug free code. I'm betting much more than the $60 billion arbitrary figure they came up with.
(emphasis mine)
I'm sorry but I have to take exception to your tone. Simply skimming a news blurb does not give you the right to trash the NIST study or label their conclusions as "arbitrary." Until you've made an effort to digest whatever analysis is contained in the 309 page study (and there is a link to the PDF file so don't say you can't do so) you really shouldn't be shitting on someone else's work. I don't think I'm being harsh by taking you to task over this. That news bulletin is an advertisement of sorts for the study. You can't possibly expect to get a full understanding of their analysis from a news blurb, for chrissake.
I'm sorry but one of my pet peeves is armchair philosophers who seem to think that they can best the experts without actually doing any work.
GMD
watch this
US Population: approx 0.25Bn
Cost of Windows XP: $200
Total cost: $50Bn
Yeah sounds about right
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. 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. No argument here. You're absolutely wrong on your first point, though.