The Pareto Principle (The 80/20 Rule)
The Pareto Principle on Wikipedia
Most things in life are not distributed evenly.
The Pareto Principle suggests that in some cases, the majority of results come from a minority of inputs:
- 80% of a certain piece of software can be written in 20% of the total allocated time (conversely, the hardest 20% of the code takes 80% of the time)
- 20% of the effort produces 80% of the result
- 20% of the work creates 80% of the revenue
- 20% of the bugs cause 80% of the crashes
- 20% of the features cause 80% of the usage
In the 1940s American-Romanian engineer Dr. Joseph Juran, who is widely credited with being the father of quality control, began to apply the Pareto principle to quality issues.
This principle is also known as: The 80/20 Rule, The Law of the Vital Few, and The Principle of Factor Sparsity.
Real-world examples:
- In 2002 Microsoft reported that by fixing the top 20% of the most-reported bugs, 80% of the related errors and crashes in windows and office would become eliminated (Reference).