October, November the Worst Months For Writing Buggy Code

chicksdaddy writes "Data from application testing firm Veracode suggests that the quality of application code submitted for auditing is pretty much constant throughout the year — except for the months of October and November, when the average density of vulnerabilities in the code jumps considerably. But why? Is it the pressure of deadlines? The stress of developers' lives (kids back to school, etc.)?"

Useless information - currently

[willaien]

Are there other jobs that have their job performance drop considerably during these two months?

If not, what can be used to explain this anomaly? Bogus study? Something unique to programmers?

Is it consistent throughout IT? Are there more reliability issues that can be traced to those months?

From experience

[james_van]

Couple of reasons from the office I work at - end of year deadlines means code gets rushed in Oct/Nov in order for testing and review before Christmas. Also, those of us who haven't taken all of our vacation time yet are forced to take time off, disrupting projects. Last minute client changes (to the projects due at the end of the year) add to the pile. And, the stress of the holidays plays a part as well (mostly because we're asocial geeks who are dreading the onslaught of family get-togethers and forced social situations). Usually by December, we've got our projects off for review and testing so there isn't much code being written, and the code that is being written is in response to problems and is a chance to take rushed, bad code and make it a little bit less bad. That's my little piece of anecdotal evidence.