The number one predictor of software bugs is organizational complexity: study

augustl.com

23 points·ingve··11 comments

> The distance to decision makers and the number of developers working on a project is clearly and unambiguously the issue that is the best predictor of future problems with a code base.

Could a mod please update the title to make it less click-bait?

"According to Microsoft, the number one predictor of software bugs is" sounds like all those side/bottom extra articles.

I took a crack at it, but the article has been flagged at this point so it's a bit moot.

Take Conway's Law into account and it's maybe not so surprising.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway's_law

The original paper on which this blog post is based is actually an explicit experimental test of Conway's law (and it's also a paper which happens to have found significant validity for Conway's law in the data they analyzed).

> Another shocking discovery for me personally, is that the only one that I've actually used myself - code coverage - has the lowest recall. In other words, almost all the issues it predicted turned out to not be real issues.

sounds like survivorship bias to me

I'd be willing to bet that it was sloppy coverage and those false positives were along component/team boundaries.

The original tech report is from 2008. Anything newer?

Here is Google’s take on bug prediction from a while back: https://google-engtools.blogspot.com/2011/12/bug-prediction-...

The study that's linked in the article replicating the results is from 2015

clickbait level: buzzfeed

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