MistyLaraCarrara opened this issue on Aug 12, 2009 · 102 posts
bagginsbill posted Thu, 13 August 2009 at 2:04 AM
Well I didn't bring this up, so don't get touchy. :)
We were talking about Alyson, when you suddenly said that many of these bugs we're seeing would have been squashed if only there had been a few testers.
I see so much arm-chair quarterbacking, combined with completely invalid assumptions, that these things kind of ring-a-ling in front of me.
So here are the facts as I understand them.
At least 45 people were beta testers, because that is how many people I counted reported bugs during testing to the bug tracking system.
That is a lower bound - the actual number is higher, because in any large group of testers, some never report any bugs, or the only bugs they have to report on are ones others found already. Some just don't bother to log in and write anything.
Based on my 25 years experience doing software product development, I'd say that typically half the beta testers never say anything, even if they find something. So the actual number is probably around 90 people.
Yes, I'd say when i used the word dozens, and you jumped down my throat, that was a bit uncalled for. Even if we assume nobody was silent, 45 is dozens, and certainly more than a few.
Now the question is how many bugs can 45 people find?
Again, based on my experience, it is a near certainty they cannot find them all. In fact, in all the beta tests I've been involved in, which is also in the dozens, none have ever found more than about 70% of the bugs. Typically 25% to 40% of all the bugs found during the life of a product are found after its release. This is normal for software products. This is why there are service releases. Anybody who doesn't believe this is living in a fantasy land.
Typically, commercial software has on average 20 to 30 bugs for every 1000 lines of code. I don't know the total number of lines written for Poser 8, but it is easily in excess of 30000 lines, probably more than that.
Based on that assumption, the number of bugs found before release by those 45 testers is well below software industry averages, and the number found since then is even lower. Despite that, I expect that somewhere around 100 more bugs will be found AFTER TODAY.
If you think that's unacceptable and your opinion can change the industry, you should probably start a software company. You'll make billions.
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