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

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

Recommend Digg Twitter ShareThis

Email Print Send Feedback Reprints

Additional Resources

POLL RESULTS

Leading IT Pros Weigh In on Top IT Issues

Accelerate your knowledge of the IT world you inhabit by viewing the results of a series of polls taken by your IT peers. These polls of 100+ IT professionals each are available for full viewing. They cover key topics such as virtualization, processor performance, green IT, cloud computing and many others. Be a part of the buzz.

WHITE PAPER

For Best Results, Think Beyond the Box

Technology is complex. Keeping it running productively shouldn't be. To that end, you want to minimize the number of solutions needed in-house to simplify operations, maintenance, and support. Kodak offers a best-practices model. One company provides support for both scanner and software, for fast problem resolution without vendor finger-pointing. Download now!

WHITE PAPER

Accelerating the Path to Demand Intelligence with a Demand Signal Repository

Utilizing demand intelligence improves the precision of pricing, product assortments, channel/store placement, and promotion, which are all essential for sustainable revenue management performance. Learn more, download this free whitepaper today.

White Papers & Webcasts

Differentiating With Technical Support: JBoss Customer Support Study
JBoss' expert technical support services is clearly acknowledged by its client base. The comprehensive nature by which their service is unsurpassed. Every category...

Managing And Protecting Your Ever Increasing Mobile Assets
(Source: Absolute Software) Your users are becoming more mobile each day. This is great for productivity - yet challenging for IT control. Natalie...

The JBoss SOA Assessment Tool: Spend Less, Do More
SOA does not have to be overly complex or expensive. The JBoss SOA Assessment Tool can help you chart a course to a...

IDC Webcast: Linux Adoption in a Global Recession
Join Al Gillen from IDC and Michael Applebaum from Novell in this on-demand webcast to see how Linux has emerged as an even...

The CIO's New Guide to Design of Global IT Infrastructure
Is it possible to eliminate the impact of distance? This paper explores the 5 key principles successful CIOs are using to redesign IT...

Novell Opens PR Video
Is the Linux desktop for me? Customers are looking for ways to be more flexible and save money. Using Linux offers a great...

IBM Lotus Notes Performance Brief
This is a Performance Brief that illustrates how Riverbed Steelhead appliances accelerate Lotus Notes R7....

2 Minutes to IT workload automation
Take just 2 minutes to watch this short CONTROL-M flash video. Well show you how BMC CONTROL-M can put money back into your...

Business Value of Performance IDC Whitepaper
Are you looking for a comprehensive solution that addresses insufficient or congested bandwidth, impaired application performance, slow remote backup and replication or obstacles...

Security Configuration Management
In this web video, follow along with Jim Hansen, Senior Product Manager with Big Fix, as he explains why Security Configuration Management is...

All White Papers | All Webcasts