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Maintainability

Linus's Law

Distributed Bug Detection.

The article

If

"Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow." A defect that looks impossible to one person often becomes trivial when many independent perspectives are applied to it — provided the code is actually visible to those perspectives.

Then

If the same class of bug keeps slipping through, the fix is not more careful review by the same people — it is exposing the code to more, differently-shaped eyes. Rotate reviewers, open up internal libraries, run bug bounties.

Unless

Open Source / Rotated Reviewers / Bug Bounties / Internal Code Discoverability

Source

Eric S. Raymond, The Cathedral and the Bazaar (1999) — named for Linus Torvalds.

Go to the source

See also