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Preventing 99% is hard. 99.9% is incredibly hard..... you have to stop somewhere.......decide where exactly to stop, you have to sit and think what the real cost of failure is

Think cost of insurance!

From my engineering school back in the 70's( things may be more precise now), 3 decimal places of accuracy was considered as good as you could get, because 4 decimal places involved estimating so many variables(especially temperature), that it would be fruitless to attempt.(also we were limited by sliderule accuracy :-) )

My point is that you only need to test to a level so that a court won't find you negligent if there was a failure. After all, money is what it is all about, being sued for negligence in a failure is what you need to avoid.

So it seems that in this day and age of insurance for everything, you would test to a level that makes the cost of insurance still acceptable. If testing to 99.99% saves you 100,000 on insurance, but requires an extra year of a team of programmers working, is it worth it?

I'm not really a human, but I play one on earth. Cogito ergo sum a bum

In reply to Re: "Practices and Principles" to death by zentara
in thread "Practices and Principles" to death by ack

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