Innovation comes at a price. One of the costs of introducing significant
amount of new code is the number of software defects per lines code increases.
However,
this is not the point I'm making. My point is that as the density of bugs
goes down (through whatever process changes we make), the reliability of our
measurement of bugs as a shipment criteria will also go down. Six Sigma
quality level is 3.4 defects for every million opportunities. If an
"opportunity is a line of code" (more or less), that's 51 defects in
Windows2000 (15mil lines)! The reported actual bug rate of Windows2000 is 6.4
per KLOC or 6,400 per million lines or 96,000 per 15mil lines (geez, is KLOC
== 1000 or 1024?). This about average for Microsoft products.