from Matt Drance:
Struggling to explain to a friend why there’s no software equivalent to NTSB crash ratings. “It’s complicated” is honest, but not acceptable
The explanation is pretty straightforward. Cars are pretty uniform. They have changed a lot, but fundamentally, they are used the same as they have been for over a century, they fail in very consistent ways, and we've thus been able to make some good well-defined tests to determine how safe a car is in the event of a crash.
Software isn't like that. Web applications may have started to follow some consistent structure, and we have some patterns we follow pretty commonly (like talking over HTTP), but the fact remains that the apps and services are super un-uniform.
That poses a real difficulty if you want to develop some standardized tests. It would be pretty easy to develop some standardized tests for an app that only spoke HTTP and used a RESTful protocol to talk to one specific web browser u