Your point in the post above is that you won’t catch the bug in your code if it outputs an answer that is close. How frequently can we expect this to occur?
If the bugs have the affect of scaling your answer by a small amount, then this is quite likely. Further, if there are a lot of such bugs, some increasing and some decreasing the final output, a person can systematically skew their results towards the one they expect by ignoring mistakes in the ‘wrong’ direction (“well, that error isn’t be the problem”) and fixing ones in the ‘right’ direction. So if you find a lot of bugs in the direction you want to correct in, you should also be sure and fix just as many in the opposite direction.
Your point in the post above is that you won’t catch the bug in your code if it outputs an answer that is close. How frequently can we expect this to occur?
If the bugs have the affect of scaling your answer by a small amount, then this is quite likely. Further, if there are a lot of such bugs, some increasing and some decreasing the final output, a person can systematically skew their results towards the one they expect by ignoring mistakes in the ‘wrong’ direction (“well, that error isn’t be the problem”) and fixing ones in the ‘right’ direction. So if you find a lot of bugs in the direction you want to correct in, you should also be sure and fix just as many in the opposite direction.