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"Various studies have shown that software broadly contains something like 6-16 bugs per 1000 lines of code."

As more features are added, the number of bugs will increase, so in a sense everyone who is not on the stability team is on the instability team. Which means the stability team would need more developers as a counterweight...

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Here are a couple of details about programming at Google. First, every commit requires a code review. Secondly, in addition to writing your own tests and testing tools, there is a separate set of developers that do nothing but write testing infrastructure, ensuring that it's as easy as possible to test everything as it's written.

Bugs still happen, of course, but they're going to be of the more obscure variety. My chromium 14.0.835.202 has never crashed. Always good to get a backtrace and read the code nearby, and if nothing makes sense, run memtest86.

That also assumes that throwing more developers on the stability team would fix the problem.

It may help by simply getting the bug-generating developers to do something else for a while.

Not necessarily. It only takes one bureaucrat to reject code that doesn't pass tests or follow required conventions. For example, a good rule of thumb is that no new code will be accepted without documentation.

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