Linus's Law

Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.

Eric S. Raymond

This law simply states that the more people who can see a problem, the higher the likelihood that someone will have seen and solved the problem before, or something very similar.

Although it was originally used to describe the value of open-source models for projects it can be accepted for any kind of software project. It can also be extended to processes - more code reviews, more static analysis and multi-disciplined test processes will make the problems more visible and easy to identify.

A more formal statement can be:

Given a large enough beta-tester and co-developer base, almost every problem will be characterized quickly and can be solved by someone who has encountered a similar problem before.

This law was named in honour of Linus Torvalds in Eric S. Raymond's book "The Cathedral and the Bazaar".