Re: Software Quality in Science

[Jerry <lanceboyle@qwest.net>]

Here is the link in the Guardian article to the original work:

http://www.leshatton.org/Documents/Texp_ICSE297.pdf

It appears that this work was done in the 1990s. The paper is actually
fairly entertaining to read, if for nothing else how scary it is. Here
is a choice comment, about a commercial program for use in the nuclear
engineering industry:

"This package climbed to an awe-inspiring 140 weighted static faults
per 1000 lines of code, and in spite of the aspirations of its
designers, amounted to no more than a very expensive random number
generator."

And this comment which addresses the use of Ada:

"In C, note that function prototypes were well used only around 60% of
the time and as a result, interface faults accounted for about 24% of
the total. In other words, if function prototypes were mandated in all
C functions, 24% of all serious faults would disappear.  The
computational scientist should not use this as an argument in favour
of C++ or Ada in which they are mandated. A large number of new
failure modes result from this action, which lack of space prohibits
further discussion here. The net result of changing languages appears
to be that the overall defect density appears to be about the same,
(Hatton 1997). In other words, when a language corrects one
deficiency, it appears to add one of its own."

Jerry