Biting Back

Find and fix 1% of your software bugs, and 90% of your system problems go away, say experts.

By Alan S. Horowitz

January 13, 2003 12:00 PM ET

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Computerworld - Bugs are small. Usually. Unless, of course, they are of the software kind, in which case they can grow quite large and become hugely expensive to fix. The Sustainable Computing Consortium, a collaboration of major corporate IT users, university researchers and government agencies, estimates that buggy or flawed software cost businesses $175 billion worldwide in 2001. In the U.S., software bugs cost companies nearly $60 billion per year, according to the Commerce Department's National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). More important is that one-third of these costs could be eliminated with improved testing that catches errors earlier in the software development process, NIST says.
Smart CIOs are creating comprehensive strategies to test for and fix bugs in both off-the-shelf software and applications created in-house. They know that bugs, like infections, fester the longer they hang around and, as a result, cost more to deal with when left unchecked.
Gartner Inc. analyst Theresa Lanowitz says a software defect left unfixed until late in the development cycle costs 80 to 1,000 times more to fix than it would if it was dealt with earlier. No company is immune to the potential costs of software bugs, which is why a comprehensive plan for dealing with them is critical.


Bob Grawien of Schneider National

"Bugs are a way of life. You have to accept that," says Vivek Wadhwa, CEO of Relativity Technologies Inc., a software vendor in Cary, N.C.
"Every piece of software will have bugs in it," agrees Lanowitz.
Some are more easily recognized than others. For example, CIO Jose Marrero and his team at Agco Corp., a $2.5 billion manufacturer and distributor of agricultural equipment in Duluth, Ga., recently thought they were updating a particular record in a database when, in fact, because of a bug, the software was updating a different field. The cost to analyze and fix the problem: $30,000 to $40,000.
Human Bug Busters
Experts say software quality assurance is as much a people issue as it is a technical one. "If you don't change the way people work, it won't help. To solve quality problems, you have to change what software people do," says Watts S. Humphrey, a fellow at Carnegie Mellon University's Software Engineering Institute.
The institute trains programmers and engineers to work in self-directed teams and to manage their work. They become owners of their plans and processes and therefore take more responsibility for the quality of their products upfront. As a result, says Humphrey, engineers, who might spend upward of 50% of their time testing

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