Increase in defect fixing costs with distance from original mistake

Derek Jones from The Shape of Code

During software development, when a mistake has been made it may be corrected soon after it is made, much later during development, by the customer in a shipped product, or never corrected.

If a mistake is corrected, the cost of correction increases as the ‘distance’ between its creation and detection increases. In a phased development model, the distance might be the number of phases between creation and detection; in a throw it at the wall and see if it sticks development model, the distance might be the number of dependencies on the ‘mistake’ code.

There are people who claim that detecting mistakes earlier will save money. This claim overlooks the cost of detecting mistakes, and in some cases earlier detection is likely to be more expensive (or the distribution of people across phases may rate limit what can be done in any phase). For instance, people might not be willing to read requirements documents, but be willing to try running software; some coding mistakes are only going to be encountered later during integration test, etc.

Folklore claims of orders of magnitude increases in fixing cost, as ‘distance’ increases, have been shown to be hand waving.

I know of two datasets on ‘distance’ between mistake creation and detection. A tiny dataset in Implementation of Fault Slip Through in Design Phase of the Project (containing only counts information; also see figure 6.41), and the CESAW dataset.

The plot below shows the time taken to fix 7,000 reported defects by distance between phases, for CESAW project 615 (code+data). The red lines are fitted regression models of the form fixTime approx sqrt{phaseDistance}, for minimum fix times of 1, 5 and 10 minutes:

Time taken to fix reported defect by distance between inserted/detected phases.

The above plot makes various simplifying assumptions, including: ‘sub-phases’ being associated with a ‘parent’ phase selected by your author, and the distance between all pairs of adjacent phase is the same (in terms of their impact on fix time).

A more sophisticated data model might change the functional form of the fitted regression model, but is unlikely to remove the general upward trend.

There are lots of fix times taking less than five minutes. Project 615 developed safety critical software, and so every detected mistake was recorded; on other projects, small mistakes would probably been fixed without an associated formal record.

I think that, if it were not for the, now discredited, folklore claiming outsized relative costs for fixing reported defects at greater ‘distances’ from the introduction of a mistake, this issue would be a niche topic.

Payback time-frame for research in software engineering

Derek Jones from The Shape of Code

What are the major questions in software engineering that researchers should be trying to answer?

A high level question whose answer is likely to involve life, the universe, and everything is: What is the most cost-effective way to build software systems?

Viewing software engineering research as an attempt to find the answer to a big question mirrors physicists quest for a Grand Unified Theory of how the Universe works.

Physicists have the luxury of studying the Universe at their own convenience, the Universe does not need their input to do a better job.

Software engineering is not like physics. Once a software system has been built, the resources have been invested, and there is no reason to recreate it using a more cost-effective approach (the zero cost of software duplication means that manufacturing cost is the cost of the first version).

Designing and researching new ways of building software systems may be great fun, but the time and money needed to run the realistic experiments needed to evaluate their effectiveness is such that they are unlikely to be run. Searching for more cost-effective software development techniques by paying to run the realistic experiments needed to evaluate them, and waiting for the results to become available, is going to be expensive and time-consuming. A theory is proposed, experiments are run, results are analysed; rinse and repeat until a good-enough cost-effective technique is found. One iteration will take many years, and this iterative process is likely to take many decades.

Very many software systems are being built and maintained, and each of these is an experiment. Data from these ‘experiments’ provides a cost-effective approach to improving existing software engineering practices by studying the existing practices to figure out how they work (or don’t work).

Given the volume of ongoing software development, most of the payback from any research investment is likely to occur in the near future, not decades from now; the evidence shows that source code has a short and lonely existence. Investing for a payback that might occur 30-years from now makes no sense; researchers I talk to often use this time-frame when I ask them about the benefits of their research, i.e., just before they are about to retire. Investing in software engineering research only makes economic sense when it is focused on questions that are expected to start providing payback in, say, 3-5 years.

Who is going to base their research on existing industry practices?

Researching existing practices often involves dealing with people issues, and many researchers in computing departments are not that interested in the people side of software engineering, or rather they are more interested in the computer side.

Algorithm oriented is how I would describe researchers who claim to be studying software engineering. I am frequently told about the potential for huge benefits from the discovery of more efficient algorithms. For many applications, algorithms are now commodities, i.e., they are good enough. Those with a career commitment to studying algorithms have a blinkered view of the likely benefits of their work (most of those I have seen are doing studying incremental improvements, and are very unlikely to make a major break through).

The number of researchers studying what professional developers do, with an aim to improving it, is very small (I am excluding the growing number of fake researchers doing surveys). While I hope there will be a significant growth in numbers, I’m not holding my breadth (at least in the short term; as for the long term, Planck’s experience with quantum mechanics was: “Science advances one funeral at a time”).

The aims of software engineering research

Derek Jones from The Shape of Code

Physics researchers aim to explain the workings of the universe (technically they build models whose behavior mimics that of the universe we can measure), biologists the workings of biological systems, and psychologists the working of the human mind.

What are researchers in software engineering aiming to do?

Talking to academics, the answer is that they aim to do research that can be published in a high impact journal.

What do those involved in commercial software development think software engineering researchers should be aiming to achieve?

Most of the commercial developers I have asked have never thought about the subject; hardly surprising, they have plenty of other issues to think about.

Those who pay for software, rather than create it, want it to be cheaper and delivered faster.

Vendors are under some pressure to reduce costs and deliver sooner. But since its inception, software has been a sellers market, which means the customer pressure does not have the impact it has in other industries.

The very large organizations who pay lots of money for software for their own use (e.g., the U.S. Department of Defence) recognise that research into software production may well save them lots of money, and at one time interesting things were being discovered, but then funding got rerouted to people with an aversion to actual software engineering, i.e., academics.

Cheaper and faster will always be of interest, and will start to become a hot topic in software engineering research once software starts to becoming a buyers market.

Maintaining existing systems continues its growth to dominating what nearly every software developer does. Dependencies on the rest of the software world (e.g., libraries and compilers) is starting to consume a large percentage of maintenance costs. Managers want to know which packages are likely to have a long and stable lifetime, and which are likely to be short-lived. An understanding of the evolution of software ecosystems is a pressing need. This is really cheaper and faster over the long term.

Cheaper and faster (short term for development, long term for maintenance) covers everything.

It’s tempting to list personnel selection, i.e., who is likely to make the best software developer. But why should the process of selecting software developers be any different from the processes used to select people to become doctors, lawyers and other professions? I’m sure that those involved in the various professions would like a magic wand that points to the appropriate people (for some definition of appropriate), this magic wand is no more likely to exist for software developers than any other profession.

What do you think the aims of software engineering research should be?