Royal Pain

Peter L. Peres plp-ysDPMY98cNQDDBjDh4tngg at public.gmane.org
Sat Jun 19 01:43:11 UTC 2004


> On Fri, Jun 18, 2004 at 07:27:26AM -0400, James Knott wrote:
> > And of course, it's impossible to prove there are no bugs.  You can only
> > fail to find some.
>
> That is actually not true.  If you have a well defined specification of
> what the behaviour of each piece of the program must be for specific
> inputs, you can actually prove the behaviour of each part of the program
> correct.  This is in fact done at some software companies.  It is
> certainly a lot more work and costs more.  It requires proper bounds
> checks, and full coverage testing at the very least.

The only thing that is reasonably certain and provable is the fact that
for any given manufacturing/testing error rate the number of bugs is
proportional to the size of the object involved, specifications included.
So a very elaborate, detailed specification may in fact have more bugs
than a simple, terse one, and they may be much harder to find and correct.
;-)

Peter
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