User:APH/sandbox

Empirical support to the validity of Linus’s law was obtained by comparing popular and unpopular project of the same organisation. Organizations like Google and Facebook are known for their quality standards. Popular projects are projects with in the top 5% number of stars (7,481 stars or more). The bug identification was measured using the corrective commit probability, ratio of commits detected to fixing bug. The analysis showed that the popular projects had more bug fixing ratio (e.g., Google’s popular projects had 27% higher bug fix rate than Google’s less popular projects). Since it is unlikely that Google lowered its quality standard in it most popular projects, this is an indication of increased bug detection efficiency in popular projects.

Other than the damage caused by bugs, some of their cost is due to the effort invested in fixing them. Lientz and al. showed in 1978 that the median of projects invest 17% of the development effort in bug fixing. In a research in 2020 on GitHub repositories showed the nowadays the median is 20%.

@Article{lientz78, Author = "B. P. Lientz and E. B. Swanson and G. E. Tompkins", Title = "Characteristics of Application Software Maintenance", Journal = cacm, Year = "1978", Volume = "21", Number = "6", Pages = "466--471", Month = "Jun", Subjects = "se", Keywords = "maintenance", Annote = "Not only the effort in different categories of maintenance, but   also that a lot of effort goes into maintenance in the first place,    and that much of it is related to user requests.", LastUpdate = "Sun Sep 17 2006." }