Re: Win2000 has 63,000 'defects'

["Marin D. Condic" <mcondic-nospam@quadruscorp.com>]

Florian Weimer wrote:
> 
> 63,000 `potential known defects' (whatever this means) isn't too bad for
> a software product consisting of over 30 million lines of code, is it?

From my experience, this number is probably derived from some internal
change request tracking system. That means that there are likely 63k
submittals of one form or another wherein there may be a large number of
duplications.

Of course not all bugs are equal in the eyes of their creator. The
"defects" could range from "Correct the spelling of XYZ in a comment in
module ABC" all the way up to "If I click on this icon the disk drive is
erased and the whole system locks up."

Still in all, I think a reasonable presumption about a large system
written in a weakly typed language would be that some significant
portion of the known defects would never occur if it had been programmed
in a more rigorous language such as Ada. In the past, I have collected
enough data on similar project comparisons to be able to convince myself
and others that Ada resulted in a decrease of defects by a factor of
four over similar systems with weak checking.

MDC
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