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Recently Microsoft, Mozilla, and VeriSign have offered "bug bounties" to help squash critical defects before release. Brilliant I say! Using money to motivate testers during development is a win-win situation. Testers win since they can get some serious cash if they put their nose to the grind-stone and the software/company wins because:
- Defects that are found and fixed early are cheaper than post-release defects (post-release cost can be 100 times development cost, e.g $50 vs $5000).
- There will be less embarrassing critical and security defects found at post-release.
- Quality Assurance (ad-hoc) is marketed, which screams "We care about quality".
- The company only pays for severe defects but will still get a valuable set of less severe defects for free.
Are there hidden costs though? I can think of a few:
- The time and effort wading through crappy and duplicate defect reports.
- Larger scale efforts to manage the plethora of testers and defects.
The benefits obviously out-weigh the hidden costs. What other positive and negatives can you think of? Talk to me fellow engineers! |
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