I came across it in a book that we were supposed to read at university thirty years ago, but the book was outrageously expensive. It cost more than all of my other textbooks put together, and the university book shop didn't have it and told me I'd have to wait months.
It's probably different now that I can click around a little on some web sites and three days later a book arrives from New Zealand. But that was thirty years ago.
Can't remember how I read that book, but I did and I know that most others in the course didn't. I find it very easy to believe that people might assume things about what it said rather than actually read the text, and hand it down to others as fact. And so what's illustrative anecdote transforms into assumedly well-researched fact.
Replying to myself... I wonder what book that was. It was a large slim hardback published sometime in the 1970s, around A4, so much earlier than the 1987 book. I don't have any course materials any more.
As I recall, they argued that making a change in the requirements specification was ~10 times cheaper than finding and fixing a bug while writing the implementation, which in turn was ~10 times cheaper than fixing it after delivery, ie. on other people's production computers at other site. There was some argument around it, but the text didn't imply exactness, as far as I can remember.
It's probably different now that I can click around a little on some web sites and three days later a book arrives from New Zealand. But that was thirty years ago.
Can't remember how I read that book, but I did and I know that most others in the course didn't. I find it very easy to believe that people might assume things about what it said rather than actually read the text, and hand it down to others as fact. And so what's illustrative anecdote transforms into assumedly well-researched fact.