Ken Nelson

One begets the other.

According to SigPwned, I shouldn’t be heading a software company!

Ask 100 CEOs of software companies if they want to ship software with bugs. What will they say? 50 won’t answer at all, saying something about how bugs are a huge problem in the industry that needs to be addressed; 40 will say “Of course not!” and promptly call their shark tank in preparation for a lawsuit; 9 will hang their heads and say “we can’t help it”; and that last 1 will look you straight in the eye and say “Absolutely.”

He then goes on to cover the economics of software development, as related to bugs anyway. And then proposes a “golden” rule:

Ergo, I propose the Golden Rules for Deciding When Your Software Is Ready for Prime Time. The Golden Rules state that you should keep testing your software and fixing bugs until the new bugs you find:

1. Aren’t embarrassing to your company.
2. Won’t tick off your customers.

Good advice SigPwned. But I got there a bit before you. I’ve used this rule for about 20 years now (-:   Slightly modified, we never stop testing/fixing because we never stop adding new features.  The rule of thumb I use is about 1/3rd of our engineering money goes to fixing problems the other 2/3rds caused.  That ratio has increased over  time as our feature set went up and our installed based grew (7000 customer sites).  Over time any software business becomes a service business because of feature and customer growth. That affects the dramatic profit margins seen when a product is newer, but you owe it to customers to do it and if you want dramatic profit, introduce a new successful additional product.

So don’t expect bug free software, except were profit isn’t a motive (NASA) or any error intolerable (money wiring).   It just isn’t worth it.