Re:How Big Is YouTube?
by pants2 on Saturday December 23, 2023 @01:07AM
(#38742042)
That's typically the Lincoln-Petersen Estimator. You can use this type of approach to estimate the number of bugs in your code too! If reviewer A catches 4 bugs, and reviewer B catches 5 bugs, with 2 being the same, then you can estimate there are 10 total bugs in the code (7 caught, 3 uncaught) based on the Lincoln-Petersen Estimator.
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But this implies that all bugs are of equal likelihood of being found which I would highly doubt, no?
Yes, it's obviously not a perfect estimate, but can be directionally helpful.
You could bucket bugs into categories by severity or type and that might improve the estimate, as well.
A similar approach is “bebugging” or fault seeding: purposely adding bugs to measure the effectiveness of your testing and to estimate how many real bugs remain. (Just don’t forget to remove the seeded bugs!)