Reducing Bug Counts

Jason Marshall has a good point:

Let us conjecture that 2 bugs take as many man-hours to fix as implementing the feature did. That's only 2 units of effort expended toward new development for every 5 available. If you could eliminate one bug per feature, that would mean 2 units out of every 4 go to new features. That's a 25% gain in productivity, and that's not counting the psychological benefits of spending less time cleaning up old code, and the political capital of appearing more professional to the rest of the organization.

Unfortunately, I find that my bugs usually only take about a tenth as much time to fix as implementing the actual features. This could mean several things. Maybe I have already achieved low bug counts. Or maybe I just spend way too long implementing features.

It's still a good point, though.