Size is the best predictor of code quality (2011)
It's the Swiss cheese paradox: "cheese has holes; bigger cheese have more holes; therefore, the more cheese, less cheese".<p>> However, I still haven’t found any studies which show what this relationship is like. Does the number of bugs grow linearly with code size? Sub-linearly? Super-linearly? My gut feeling still says “sub-linear”.<p>We know from observing reality that even buggy software is better than no software – a software so buggy it adds negative value is a rare exception. So I guess it has to be "sub-linear", otherwise software wouldn't have economies of scale.<p>The contradiction though is: how do we explain the apparent stability of large but <i>mature</i> codebases? Thinking something like Emacs for example here, where some commits date back to 197X. I guess at some point it becomes an inverted U shape even if codebase grows, if it grows at a <i>conservative</i> pace.