The bugs you know are scarier than the ones you don’t.
Our company grew out of research at the University of Illinois. We were working on systems mining technology and how to use it to improve source code quality. A number of commercial software companies approached us and as we began working with them, we discovered something rather amazing: Software companies – including the big, serious ones – continuously release previously fixed bugs to their customers. They don’t mean to, but they do.
Here are the facts as we found them:
- Up to 45% of software bugs are previously fixed bugs
- Nearly 50% of software releases in the field contains known security vulnerabilities
- 10% of the bugs that have already been “fixed” in development, slip into actual releases.
Customer satisfaction is often damaged when previously fixed bugs keep reappearing in the field. Brand reputation can be put in the line. And the productivity and motivation of development teams is often shattered.
We often see companies redirect engineering resources in an effort to diagnose and fix the same bugs repeatedly. But, the manual approaches used to address this problem usually fail to solve it, because today’s development cycles are so fast and unforgiving. Cycle times wind up being prolonged, but teams have little to show for it with in software quality.
We wanted to help. Plus we are kind of obsessed with code quality. That’s what prompted us to hang out our shingle here in Silicon Valley.
-- Spiros
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