Rolling the software dice - how long to find all the bugs?

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PeterMc
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2011/03/26 17:00:57 (permalink)

Rolling the software dice - how long to find all the bugs?

How long should it take to find all the bugs in complicated software like X1?

How many different scenarios have to be tested by QA and beta testers? Let's say there are 100 different combinations of options/knobs/menus etc. and that they are all independent. That's 2^100 different combinations to test - each option can be on or off independently of the others. That's about 10^30 - a 10 followed by 30 zeroes. Now let's suppose each tester can find one bug per minute, and there are 1000 testers. These are very generous figures, but bear with me. It will take 10^27 minutes to find all the bugs. How long is this? There are 525,000 minutes in a year, so about 2x10^24 years. How old is the universe? About 14x10^9 years.

The answer: many, many times the age of the universe!

I leave you to draw your own conclusions, or at least fill in those bug reports and do your bit :)

Cheers, Peter.

post edited by PeterMc - 2011/03/26 19:20:13

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    snookerc
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    Re:A reflection on the maths of software testing 2011/03/26 17:41:33 (permalink)

    + 1^100   

    And...
    • * 2 for 32-bit and 64-bit
    • * x different hardware configurations
    • different operating systems
    • etc, etc...


      
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