Re: Re: Firewalls breaking stuff: [Was re: fwtk]

[Dana Nowell <DanaNowell () cornerstonesoftware com>]

I'm afraid I'm a little late to the party as I've been out on vacation.
But ...

> On Fri, 19 Jul 2002, Paul Robertson wrote:
>
>
> I think you can certianly make the argument that given $programmer with 
> $number of bugs/kloc, reducing kloc reduces $number.  Given severe/bugs, 
> reducing bugs reduces the number of sever bugs.  Also adding in 
> functionality generally needing to increase complexity, and at least 
> statistically I think you can assume that you'll have less severe problems 
> and problems of lesser severity when you reduce functionality/code.

In my experience, it depends :-).  In general if the code removed was all
the simple boilerplate stuff and the code remaining was all the nasty
complex stuff, the absolute number of bugs remains roughly constant and the
number/kloc increases.  It's the age old issue, bugs/kloc implies that all
kloc are created equal, and they aren't.  In fact they are frequently not
even close.  Take a good programmer, have him/her write code they are used
to writing, take same programmer have them write nasty low level protocol
crap they have never even heard of before, wanna bet the bugs/kloc are the
same?  Now assume you have someone working on a project where 70% is simple
straight forward stuff and 30% is mean nasty low level crap they've
never/rarely done before.  Because I'm a security minded manager, I remove
one third of the project, but from the simple part, I keep all the nasty
stuff because I need it.  Are you REALLY saying I dropped one third of the
bugs?  REALLY?  

Now if you were implying the age old, "the programmer used is equally good
at all aspects of the project" hence all kloc are the same...  Can I hire
YOUR staff, mine seems deficient. :-).


Dana Nowell     Cornerstone Software Inc.
Voice: (603) 595-7480 Fax: (603) 882-7313
mailto:DanaNowell () CornerstoneSoftware com

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