Re: Is strong typing worth the cost?

["Marin David Condic" <dont.bother.mcondic.auntie.spam@[acm.org>]

In the metrics I was involved in collecting that demonstrated a factor of
four reduction in errors by using Ada, we did exactly that. We did an
analysis of the change requests filed against the systems and categorized
them to determine what sort of errors went away. One of the categories that
saw the largest reductions was one that dealt with various math errors
relating to scaled integers versus Ada's fixed point types (with related
type checking). It was strong evidence that the strong typing Ada provided
contributed significantly to error reduction.

Of course, this implies that the shop in question has some sort of change
request system or other data source to analyze. I know of lots of software
operations where change control and configuration management are either
non-existent or so primitive that you wouldn't have the information needed
to determine what the bugs were. You can't improve your process if you don't
have a process. :-)

MDC
--
Marin David Condic
Senior Software Engineer
Pace Micro Technology Americas    www.pacemicro.com
Enabling the digital revolution
e-Mail:    marin.condic@pacemicro.com


"Mike Silva" <mjsilva697@earthlink.net> wrote in message
news:27085883.0205010632.4c8225d8@posting.google.com...
>
> How about doing what I did: keep track of each bug found in their
> currently-developing code, and then determine whether strong typing
> would have either prevented it or turned a multi-day debug into a
> multi-minute debug.  This will prove to be a very sobering exercise,
> especially in the case of bugs so nasty that they had programmers
> considering new careers in door-to-door sales.
>