Saving Software From Itself

摘要

Each year American businesses spend tens of billions of dollars installing software that they know to be defective. Bad software leads to security vulnerabilities that vandals and thieves exploit, and wastes hours of productive time as techies desperately fix bugs in the code. It's hard to put a number on the problem, but the National Institute of Standards & Technology has arrived at the figure of $60 billion a year as an estimate of the amount spent identifying and correcting software errors. It is not because the people making these software products are particularly bad or stupid. Critical parts are typed up by hand and, despite a wealth of testing tools that claim to catch bugs, the complexity of software makes security flaws and errors nearly unavoidable and increasingly common.