oss-sec mailing list archives
Re: Deficient engineering processes
From: Seth Arnold <seth.arnold () canonical com>
Date: Thu, 2 Apr 2020 02:46:11 +0000
On Wed, Apr 01, 2020 at 07:42:38PM -0400, Jeffrey Walton wrote:
My question is, how to convince someone that following standard project management procedures is a good thing? How do we get them
I've heard variations on the phrase "we don't have time to fix these bugs before release" or "this new feature is our top priority" from dozens of projects over the years. The impression is that fixing bugs won't win new customers, or finding bugs proactively means you might spend time fixing bugs your users might not encounter in practice (thus that time is wasted). But we have all seen software that's too buggy to be enjoyable, or even so buggy it is not fit for use. We've all got horror stories of a known, but ignored, bug, that cost thousands or millions of dollars. (I imagine a handful of people even know of billion-dollar errors. The usual example is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tony_Hoare#Apologies_and_retractions but this is probably far from the only case.) The costs of unknown or unfixed bugs is largely hidden from view, until the cost is large and impossible to ignore. We all also have examples of bugs that we're very glad to have caught before release: the bugs that would have cost thousands, or millions, of dollars to repair after release, if it's possible at all. These are much less known. Perhaps we need to talk more about our successes, too? Not just the cases where we went wrong, but also the cases where we went right, and thus saved a fortune? Thanks
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Current thread:
- Deficient engineering processes Jeffrey Walton (Apr 01)
- Re: Deficient engineering processes Michael Orlitzky (Apr 01)
- Re: Deficient engineering processes Russ Allbery (Apr 01)
- Re: Deficient engineering processes Seth Arnold (Apr 01)
- Re: Deficient engineering processes Ulisses Albuquerque (Apr 02)
- Re: Deficient engineering processes Reed Black (Apr 02)