Communications of the ACM
How to Find Bugs in Giant Software Programs
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University of Calgiari researcher Michele Marchesi and colleagues have developed a way that software developers can allocate resources to error correction. Marchesi analyzed a database of Java programs called Eclipse and found that the size of the programs followed a log normal distribution, which means that the database and, by extension, any large project, is made up of several small programs and just a few big ones. Marchesi found that errors are far more likely to occur in large programs. The study found that the top 20 percent of the largest programs contained more than 60 percent of the bugs.
The study provides a template for finding the most errors as quickly as possible in a software project by focusing on the largest programs.
From Technology Review
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