A team of five Cambridge Judge Business School MBA students made headlines in the press for the work they completed during their Cambridge Venture Project (CVP) for software fim Undo Ltd.
As part of their CVP, Graham Carver, Lisa Jeng, Paul Cheak, Tom Britton and Tommy Katzenellenbogen were asked by Undo to quantify the cost of bugs to software companies.
The team’s research, conducted during Michaelmas Term, showed that on average software developers spend 50 per cent of their programming time finding and fixing bugs. When projecting this figure onto the total cost of employing software developers this inefficiency is estimated to cost the global economy $312 billion every year; this includes costs associated with the delay in delivery of products. The MBAs also found that respondents who used Undo’s reversible debugging technology spent an average of 26 per cent less time debugging.
Cambridge MBA Tom Britton said:
The CVP project provided a great platform to put the knowledge learned in class into a real world situation. The cultural, work experience, and personality diversity within our team encouraged us all to learn and adapt and I think we all gained a much better sense of what it takes to manage a global team. Our client listened to our ideas and was supportive of what we were trying to do. Ultimately the success of the project comes as an added bonus to the hands on learning and experience gained.”
Undo Software provides a high performance reversible debugging tool specifically for Linux; UndoDB. UndoDB version 3.5 was released in 2012, after which several important customers were engaged and the company took on their first external investment round. Undo is currently working on an ARM version, set to be released in the first quarter of 2013.