Author(s)

L. Hatton

Abstract

The quality and reliability of scientific software L. Hatton Programming Research Ltd. Waynflete House, 74-76 High ABSTRACT According to studies done by Hatton [1], commercially released C and Fortran have a statically detectable fault every 80 and 130 lines respectively, on average. This survey also found that there was no particular relationship with environment in which the software was developed. Many industries were represented in Hatton's survey, but the survey addresses only static issues and specifically does not address the impact of these faults on the users who would argue that their software works "anyway". This paper describes the results of comparing the output of 9 identical packages for the same input data and same options in one of the industries covered by Hatton's study and discusses the likely implications for run-time use of software in the other industries. This gigantic software calibration project is described in more detail in Hatton and Roberts [2]

Keywords