The economics of software quality
by Capers Jones · first published 2012
12mentions
4recommended by
7HN commenters
2015–2025first – last mentioned
57% recommend43% neutral
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If you want to see how a properly referenced text looks like, pick any of the following: * Code Complete - McConnell * The Economics of Software Quality - Capers Jones * Facts and Fallacies of Software Engineering - Robert Glass * Making Software - Oram & Wilson ... and there are many others. Not all references have survived the test of time, L. Bossavit…
on “Software Architecture Guide” ↗…managed scope, schedule & budget (see: all of professional program management). Please look up the papers on planning & quality & cost & schedule from Capers Jones. The textbook is literally titled "The Economics of Software Quality". Tom DeMarco's classic is "Controlling Software Projects". I'm trying to give you a starting point to see that it's not even my anecdotes, but repeatable studies that show this. Your examples are that…
on “Plan the Sprint, Not the Project” ↗There's great research about zero defect software, and my favorite is a weird grey textbook by Capers Jones called "The Economics of Software Quality" In it you'll find that this level of requirements gathering, blueprint/spec writing and code inspection are actually cheaper in a relatively short time (months, not years). Writing specifications that…
on “They Write the Right Stuff (1996)” ↗…engineering practitioners, such as Capers Jones, who has long studied projects quantitatively and published detailed statistics on the effectiveness of different development approaches. His book "The Economics of Software Quality" is an excellent summary of his findings across thousands of projects. Reading it is like the first time you run a profiler and you realize that what you think you knew is true in part, but that other…
on “John Carmack discusses the art and science of software engineering (2012)” ↗…programming I would rate the following books highly, but at the same time it seems a bit fruitless to me to read about programming, rather than spending more time reading about psychology or sociology: - the Economics of Software Quality - Peopleware - Pragmatic programmer - Mythical Man month ^you'll see that these books are hardly kept secret, it's just that people quote them but don't actually read them, or so it seems.
on “Logical fallacies in software engineering” ↗…Of course, the data I cited was not the only data available on the economic impact of software quality. There is a whole chapter on the topic of the economic benefits of reducing bugs in the book "The Economics of Software Quality" by Capers Jones, Olivier Bonsignour Addison-Wesley, Jun 3, 2011. The book is packed with valuable references if you're looking for more data on why it's worthwhile to reduce production bug density using…
on “The Outrageous Cost of Skipping TDD and Code Review” ↗Hm, I thought the leading person around the concept of cost increases later in the cycle was actually Capers Jones, and his text about it and cleanroom: The Economics of Software Quality. Obviously this is NOT about TDD, but about Cleanroom, but it seems like you've done a lot of research in the area.
on “The Cost of Skipping TDD and Code Reviews (2016)” ↗…supreme. And Clojure is the most expressive [4] out of languages that can leverage huge ecosystems (Java and JS, soon C++ through Jank dialect). [1] https://danluu.com/empirical-pl/ [2] PBX study from Economics of Software Quality by Caper Jones [3] https://arxiv.org/pdf/1901.10220 [4] https://redmonk.com/dberkholz/2013/03/25/programming-languag...
on “The programmers who live in Flatland” ↗> The majority of what software engineers build is new territory. I think this is where we just fundamentally disagree. I can send you research about zero defect software, or the economics of software quality, or even research of across many disciplines how delivering value earlier is not in conflict with planning. Time spent planning in all cases saves time and money. However, if you think it's all going…
on “Plan the Sprint, Not the Project” ↗…TCO, then any method with less planning delivers faster and costs less. However, if you assume your software lasts longer than ~year (as pointed out in my initial reference, and his much larger work "The Economics of Software Quality") then they perform much worse. The actual payoffs in most of his research is around 8 months of development. Being "quick" is basically a jab from Jones about agile project quality. > You're not even…
on “Plan the Sprint, Not the Project” ↗…claims instead of using absolutes like "planning always results in..." > However, if you assume your software lasts longer than ~year (as pointed out in my initial reference, and his much larger work "The Economics of Software Quality") then they perform much worse. The actual payoffs in most of his research is around 8 months of development. Why would you assume that? Lots of software these days lasts far less than a year, and that's…
on “Plan the Sprint, Not the Project” ↗Economics of Software Quality has a function point to language conversion data, and function point to quality charts, so you could possibly say infer from that.
on “Haskell is a Bad Programming Language (2020)” ↗