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My life as a Code Economist

Eric Sink (Update: I previously said Eric Rice - who does AudioBlog, not SourceGear - thanks to Ranjith Anthony for recorrecting me) continues his posts, certainly qualifying him to have one of the most valuable site for software developers and managers. This one is on Testing, or debugging, or the horrors of shipping on Halloween.

Especially in the wake of Microsoft's launch of Visual Studio, this post is an exceptionally good read. He describes each bug with four qualifiers: frequency, severity, cost and risk. Sound obvious? Read it - print it and then send it to your nearest manager. This is an article worth reading especially when he compares levels of severity:

# The top of the graph represents a bug with extremely severe impact:
"This bug causes the user's computer to burst into flame."
# The bottom of the graph represents a bug with extremely low impact:
"One of the pixels on the splash screen is the wrong shade of gray."

How many times have you had to fix the BOTTOM issue BEFORE the top one?

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