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A comment on What can be learned from studying long gone development practices?.

Re:What can be learned from studying long gone development p... by galaxyLogic on Sunday August 15, 2021 @05:27PM (#28192683)
It is possible to produce software of great quality if you are willing to spend a lot of money on it. And if you want to build big system good quality is a necessity. Else you will discover like IBM did early on that fixing one bug on average can create 1.2 new bugs, or something like that.

The issue is that often the quality is good enough to have something that works and then the buyer/payer does not want to spend more. Problem with that is it makes the maintenance and future adaptations expensive and can turn the system into one where fixing one bug creates 1.2 new bugs.

Therefore I think it is wise to err on the side of caution and spend more on software quality than seems to be needed immediately. It is a bit like in the early days of bridge-building the bridges needed to be built stronger than needed because it was not possible to calculate the safety margins accurately.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:What can be learned from studying long gone development p... by azta6521 on Sunday August 15, 2021 @05:40PM (#28192775)
Yes and no. I'm too amazed by a world which longs for so many software developers. I mean do they all know that all that software has to be maintained? That software is one of the most expensive human artifacts today and that software rots like hell?
[ Parent | on HN ]