Re:How programmers make sure that their software is correct
by toast0 on Thursday January 06, 2022 @11:12AM
(#29825385)
There's always a tradeoff between the cost of finding a defect before shipping and the cost of finding it after shipping.
NASA and nuclear power stations have a rather high cost to remediate some software defects, so it makes sense to work much harder to find them earlier. Same thing with anything life safety critical. You can't patch a bug and uncrash your space probe, or unmeltdown your powerplant, or unkill your patient. But a lot of other stuff is ok; yeah, it's not great if music players don't work on Jan 1 of years after a leap year, but you'll have four years for the product to decline into irrelevancy before that happens again (or to get patches out, if Zune had market fit)
NASA and nuclear power stations have a rather high cost to remediate some software defects, so it makes sense to work much harder to find them earlier. Same thing with anything life safety critical. You can't patch a bug and uncrash your space probe, or unmeltdown your powerplant, or unkill your patient. But a lot of other stuff is ok; yeah, it's not great if music players don't work on Jan 1 of years after a leap year, but you'll have four years for the product to decline into irrelevancy before that happens again (or to get patches out, if Zune had market fit)