Re: Win2000 has 63,000 'defects'

[pontius@twonky.btv.MBI.com.invalid (Dale Pontius)]

In article <150220001931201946%emery@grebyn.com>,
        David Emery <emery@grebyn.com> writes:
...
> On a related note, around 1990 or so, MITRE did a study on life-cycle
> costs of Ada83 vs other languages.  At that point, we had many
> large systems well into development, with few that had been deployed
> and were in real maintenance.
>
> The result:  Ada maintenance costs were shown to be linear on KSLOC.
> This is in stark opposition to Boehm and similar studies that showed
> cost to maintain code was exponental on KSLOC.

Now let's take these facts, and tie them back to the original topic
of the thread. Supposedly, Win2k has about 35MLOC. I've heard numbers
between 30 and 40 MLOC, pick one and let's not haggle. I'm also under
the impression that about 2/3 of that is enhancement of the stable
NT4 code base, and about 1/3 of that is new.

Presumably there are bodies of knowledge that indicate defect rates
on mature and new code.

Apply that knowledge to what we know of Win2k, and what does the
estimate come out at? Is 63000 defects a civil number for an estimated
24MLOC of old code and 12MLOC of new code? At this point, I'm not
saying anything good or bad about Microsoft. I'm merely questioning
the historical perspective on a body of code of this size.

Dale Pontius
NOT speaking for IBM