Re: Win2000 has 63,000 'defects'

[Joe Wisniewski <wisniew@acm.org>]

In article <88hbpp$j4i$1@news.btv.ibm.com>,
  pontius@twonky.btv.MBI.com.invalid (Dale Pontius) wrote:
> 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
>

Also consider ..."
   Categorization of the "defects". If the 63K defects are
   accurate and account for EVERY possible "fix" that may or may
   not be a "defect" or even necessary such as a separate defect for
   every typo in the help file, ..., 63K may not be that big a deal,
   especially if that number includes enhancements, which are often
   included in normal defect tracking, just categorized differently.

   In fact one _could_ make the argument that this is a real step up
   wrt turning Windows releases into a real software engineering
   effort. That is, identify every possible thing wrong that has
   shown up in beta, not matter how trivial it may seem right now.

Joe


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