Hacker News Reader

Impressive that FBSD only had 20% more bugs over OBSD despite having 200% more lines of code.

Considering that this was apparently one person doing investigative research, and a very small fraction of each code base (freebsd apparently has about 9 million LOC, openbsd 2.9 million), I do not think it is reasonable to state that freeBSD "only had 20% more bugs", but rather only that the investigator found 20% more bugs in it in his research. He probably examined a similar number of LOC of each OS and spent a similar amount of time on each OS if I had to make a guess -- the slides do not say however.

If he had spent three times more time on freebsd than on openbsd I would agree with you.

This raises some interesting questions about sample selection when statistically or probabilistically analyzing a piece of software.

In statistical analysis you need to have a clear definition for your "unit of observation". Is it individual lines? Is it individual methods? Is there some way to break down code intofunctional units? Is it entire code paths?

Without having a well-defined unit of analaysis and a consistent sampling scheme, extrapolation is difficult or impossible using conventional statistical tools, without making some very big assumptions.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com