Process VS Product

Posted Dec 12, 2002 10:03 UTC (Thu) by bockman (guest, #3650)
Parent article: The Ptech Incident

While I might agree that the open-source development process is not inherently more secure than closed source development (although it has more potential to be secured), I want to point out that industry conventional wisdom puts quite a large amount of trust in the correctness of the process, to ensure the fitness of the product. This is what Product Assurance is all about: they don't inspect every single product coming out of a factory line. They make sure that the process that generates those products is correct.

How much of this is applicable to software, which is still an handcraft (mindcraft?) product, is debatable. IMO, in case of software, the quality of developers counts more than good PA procedures. This is why software that comes out of an evolutionary highly vital environment, such as some open source products, is so good.