I hope I don't sound rantish, but the author completely missed on his treatment of the Boehm/Beck curves
The Beck curve seems to (I'm not expert) describe the cost of making a change or adding a feature. With routine deployment in XP, it's not going to be that expensive to roll out a new one (although, the Facebook push is a process that requires the complete, undivided attention of lots of smart people, so you don't exactly get it "for free")
The Boehm curve describes the cost of finding a defect. If you find a defect in unit testing, you've wasted one person's time; in inspection, two; in systems testing, possibly many more than two; and in production, potentially 500 million people's time. Not just that, but the bugs are much harder to find.
Consider a hypothetical bug that leaks memory in the event of network flakiness. Your servers are humming along just fine, there's a transient network failure that you fix, and then you think you're fine. Meanwhile you've leaked a ton of memory, web servers start swapping, and the user experience goes to shit as most requests are delayed or timed out. You can fix this by restarting everything (but you should fear the cold roll in general [1]). So now you're fucked; you've got this weird bug that only shows up when the planets align while the microwave is on, no easy repro, and it's costing you real time and money.
The Beck curve seems to (I'm not expert) describe the cost of making a change or adding a feature. With routine deployment in XP, it's not going to be that expensive to roll out a new one (although, the Facebook push is a process that requires the complete, undivided attention of lots of smart people, so you don't exactly get it "for free")
The Boehm curve describes the cost of finding a defect. If you find a defect in unit testing, you've wasted one person's time; in inspection, two; in systems testing, possibly many more than two; and in production, potentially 500 million people's time. Not just that, but the bugs are much harder to find.
Consider a hypothetical bug that leaks memory in the event of network flakiness. Your servers are humming along just fine, there's a transient network failure that you fix, and then you think you're fine. Meanwhile you've leaked a ton of memory, web servers start swapping, and the user experience goes to shit as most requests are delayed or timed out. You can fix this by restarting everything (but you should fear the cold roll in general [1]). So now you're fucked; you've got this weird bug that only shows up when the planets align while the microwave is on, no easy repro, and it's costing you real time and money.
[1]http://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/n49rw/were_ba...