Send in the Exterminators

Computerworld - Bugs. The nickname for software defects makes them sound like a natural phenomenon, even kind of cute and relatively harmless. When I say "bug," I think ladybug. But this week's Future Watch suggests that programming errors are akin to cockroaches -- as difficult to eradicate as those hard-shelled denizens of the dark and damp that, as urban legend would have it, could survive a nuclear blast.
Or maybe the correct analogy is to termites, as in something that insatiably chews through a company's profits and undermines the framework of the business.
The Sustainable Computing Consortium, a collaboration of major corporate IT users, academics and government agencies, has estimated that defective software cost businesses around the globe $175 billion in 2001.
And a 2002 study by the U.S. Commerce Department's National Institute of Standards and Technology indicated that software bugs cost U.S. companies about $60 billion per year.
That's a big bite out of the economy. Software is almost everywhere -- in your toaster, in your car, in the power grid, in the airplane you'll take to meet your next client and, of course, in your back-office and, increasingly, front-office systems, no matter what business you're in.
It's time we stopped talking about software defects as though they're just an inevitable part of doing that business.
Last week in this space, Computerworld's Robert L. Mitchell complained loudly about software vendors that assume no liability for the defects in their products and about the legal loopholes that allow them to do so. Ratcheting up legal pressure on companies to stop selling defective software is probably a good idea.
But a hailstorm of litigation isn't going to solve all or even most of the problems caused by flawed code.
One reason is that the wheels of justice grind exceedingly slowly and the problem is building to crisis proportions.
Another is the intricate interrelationship between the vendors of large software systems and their customers -- a company has to be pushed pretty far to sue the vendor that has its tentacles around so much key information. And then there's the fact that a lot of the programming errors that cost companies money are made by in-house coders.
Almost everyone agrees that the rush to market is the reason so many software bugs crawl through development shops and creep out to end users.
Too often, cutting corners in quality is seen as a necessary trade-off to getting the product out the door quickly. And we know defects that are overlooked in the race to market