Re:The software development final exam: Mathematics
by Silhouette on Wednesday October 10, 2012 @05:33PM
(#4638331)
You receive a call at 3 AM from someone in the marketing department, asking if there is a problem with the web site because they haven't seen an order in 20 minutes.
If you could plausibly go 20 minutes without receiving an order, this isn't a question about statistics, it's a question about PR.
Moreover, the kind of place that doesn't take an order more than every few minutes probably doesn't pay someone to be on call at 3am.
And what does the marketing department have to do with this? How is that I am running a web site that is important enough to wake me at 3am because someone isn't sure if there's a problem, yet we don't have any operations people who know the normal working of the system well enough to make the call on when something is broken?
Like most contrived examples of how "important" statistics is in software development, IME, yours makes no sense when considered in a realistic context.
You are thinking of including 30 days of toll free phone support with your next product, and have calculated that for this to work out financially you will need less than 1% of your customers to call support.
Again, in any realistic scenario, that little "to work out financially" probably involves far more complicated considerations than some basic probability distribution, and if this choice is being made by a random programmer based on a simplistic model then you're doing it wrong.
If you could plausibly go 20 minutes without receiving an order, this isn't a question about statistics, it's a question about PR.
Moreover, the kind of place that doesn't take an order more than every few minutes probably doesn't pay someone to be on call at 3am.
And what does the marketing department have to do with this? How is that I am running a web site that is important enough to wake me at 3am because someone isn't sure if there's a problem, yet we don't have any operations people who know the normal working of the system well enough to make the call on when something is broken?
Like most contrived examples of how "important" statistics is in software development, IME, yours makes no sense when considered in a realistic context.
You are thinking of including 30 days of toll free phone support with your next product, and have calculated that for this to work out financially you will need less than 1% of your customers to call support.
Again, in any realistic scenario, that little "to work out financially" probably involves far more complicated considerations than some basic probability distribution, and if this choice is being made by a random programmer based on a simplistic model then you're doing it wrong.