I've only skimmed the original paper, but this article is intriguing--"...in their study, the top 20 per cent of the largest programs contained over 60 per cent of the bugs."

I've felt like longer functions are more bug-prone per line of code than shorter ones, and this study seems to confirm that intuition.

2 Comments:

May 26, 2009 12:20 PM  Igor Ostrovsky said

The result is only interesting if top 20% largest programs represent significantly fewer than 60% lines of code. I only skimmed ... did the authors address that point?  

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May 26, 2009 7:58 PM  Roy said

My impression was that they *were* saying that bug densities in larger programs are higher. I'd have to read it more carefully, I guess.  

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