Brendan Tompkins [MVP]

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The Linear Software Price/Bug Ratio

I am now totally convinced that the more you pay for a software package, the crappier the code base and the buggier it is. Of course, all of my evidence is anecdotal, but here's a quick graph I threw together that illustrates this.

This is all based on some recent experience with companies, who I'll not name here...

-Brendan

Published Dec 17 2004, 09:21 AM by Brendan Tompkins

Comments

Mike Powell said:

Hilarious! The little jog to the right tells me at somewhere around the 3.2 dollar sign price point I can get almost a whole extra bug for about the same money.

# December 17, 2004 5:32 AM

Brendan Tompkins said:

Mike. Yes, I also found that data point interesting, not sure I've isolated all of the variables, but hey, I'm just reporting the data the way I find it.

# December 17, 2004 5:36 AM

Josh Pollard said:

But after about 4 $ signs, the bugs level off.... Maybe somewhere in that range is the correct price ;-)

# December 18, 2004 12:00 AM

andy brummer said:

So according to this chart, 0$ = 0 bugs. Sweet!!! Open source really is better. lol

# January 8, 2005 5:33 AM

Mysterious Odor said:

In your example, the independent variable is "Dollars Spent" and the dependent variable is "Number of Bugs". The independent variable belongs on the x-axis. In addition to this, your graph does not show a linear relationship between these variables. One last thing, a correlation between two variables does not necessarily imply a causal relationship.

# January 11, 2005 11:18 AM

Brendan Tompkins said:

You are correct, mysterious odor from microsoft. :)

# January 18, 2005 3:48 AM

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About Brendan Tompkins

Brendan has been programming with .NET since the first public beta and is owner and operator of Port Technology Services, a consultancy company providing .NET application development services to the Maritime industry. In July, 2007, he was awarded the Microsoft MVP award for ASP.NET. He's also a proud co-founder of failed .COM startup Intrinsigo, and has had a hand in the failure of numerous other businesses. He currently runs CodeBetter.Com and Devlicio.us, and lives in Norfolk, Virgina with his wife Tiara and son Ian.