Editing Software bug (section)

=== Implications ===
The amount and type of damage a software bug may cause affects decision-making, processes and policy regarding software quality. In applications such as [[human spaceflight]], [[aviation]], [[nuclear power]], [[health care]], [[public transport]] or [[automotive safety]], since software flaws have the potential to cause human injury or even death, such software will have far more scrutiny and quality control than, for example, an online shopping website. In applications such as banking, where software flaws have the potential to cause serious financial damage to a bank or its customers, quality control is also more important than, say, a photo editing application.

Other than the damage caused by bugs, some of their cost is due to the effort invested in fixing them. In 1978, Lientz et al. showed that the median of projects invest 17 percent of the development effort in bug fixing.<ref>{{Cite journal|title = Characteristics of Application Software Maintenance|journal = Communications of the ACM |date = 1978 |pages = 466–471|volume = 21|doi = 10.1145/359511.359522|first1 = B. P.|last1 = Lientz |first2 = E. B.|last2 = Swanson |first3 = G. E.|last3 = Tompkins|issue = 6 |s2cid = 14950091 |doi-access = free}}</ref> In 2020, research on [[GitHub]] repositories showed the median is 20%.<ref>{{cite arXiv |last1=Amit |first1=Idan |last2=Feitelson |first2=Dror G.|date=2020 |title=The Corrective Commit Probability Code Quality Metric |class=cs.SE |eprint=2007.10912}}</ref>

{{anchor|residual defects|Deployment failures}}