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Avoiding Death By Exposure

There's no such thing as a small bug. Customers, be they people or businesses, do not measure Software bugs in metres, feet or miles or kilograms. They use measures like time wasted, life-lost and money.  Take a recent bug from Facebook . It affected thousands, maybe millions of customers and the bottom line of companies (seemingly) unconnected with Facebook such as Spotify, Tik-Tok and SoundCloud, and probably countless smaller companies. So why did the journalist seem to think it was small? Too often we judge the systems we create by how likely they are to fail, given our narrow view of the world. A better measure is our exposure when the systems fail . The exposure for Facebook is a greater motivation for other companies to disentangle themselves from Facebook's SDK, or promote a rival platform. It doesn't matter if our bug is one tiny assumption or one character out of place, if it stops a million people from using or buying an app then it's a huge bug.