Quality Assurance Testing

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What's the Cost of Inadequate Quality Assurance Testing?

During difficult economic times, one of the first things that seems to get cut back is the quality assurance testing. Although quality assurance is often listed in the unimportant category, it can make a huge impact in your product and your company's overall revenue and success. The fewer bugs your product ships with, the more your savings. In fact, the cost of fixing anomalies during the design and implementation phase of your development will be less than a quarter of what it will cost once your product has been released. It's not the job of your customers to identify and test your products for you - unless you'd really like to alienate them and lose their future business. All it takes is one other vendor with a more stable, better designed product to cause your market share to drop like a rock (see WordPerfect vs. Word).

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) said software bugs are so prevalent and so detrimental that they cost the U.S. economy an estimated $59.5 billion annually. Let's take a quick look at what it would cost you due to inadequate quality assurance before your release your product:

  • Developer Labor. Once a bug is reported, someone will need to track the anomaly and validate it. You'll then need to have your developer do a design review, documentation, and code review, including inspections and walk-throughs of the code. Once the anomaly is located, your developer will need to determine the appropriate changes to make, verify that the changes do not impact other code/calls, rework the code, and perform a preliminary evaluation to make sure the anomaly is fixed. Once the testing team has validated the bug has been fixed and the rest of the product is still functional, your developer will need to roll together a patch or update which may contain multiple bug fixes.
  • Testing Labor. Once the bug has been preliminarily identified and fixed, it's up to the QA team to re-validate the product. This may require not only a custom test designed to validate the original anomaly, but execution of manual and/or automated tools to verify that the rest of the product has not be adversely effected by fixing the bug (e.g., patching the firmware to fix a bug with product A doesn't lead to a new bug with product B, patching software to fix bug A hasn't created a brand new bug B, etc.). In addition, your QA team may be required to update their test cases, test plans, and test scripts (automated or manual) to account for the changes in the product. Once they have validated the fix, they'll need to inform the appropriate people via bug tracking system. And finally, the QA team will need to mark the bug fixed in your tracking system.
  • Customer Support Labor. Customer support may suffer from increased traffic via phone, email, chat, and online forums to handle public response to the located anomaly. This will require additional hours to not only support customers, track the anomaly, provide info regarding work arounds, but may even require additional support costs such as recovery of data.
  • Public Relations Labor. In addition to customer support issues, your PR team may need to get involved to help stem the outcry from angry customers (e.g., such as those who've lost irreplaceable data in addition to their valuable time). A large bug can be a PR nightmare right at the time when your company needs all the positive press it can get.
  • Revenue Loss. Finally, don't forget that with buggy/anomaly-ridden products you can suffer severe hits in goodwill from your customer base. If your product is not up to your customers expectations, you can expect that they'll be looking for another product that does meet their needs. Customers may point out problems such as the product not having the features they expected, unacceptable user interface, inadequate maintenance/support, and the product not appears to be robust, accurate or secure. Every current customer nowadays is worth a dozen potential customers. What does this look in terms of money?
  • Developer Labor = (additional hours required * average salary * number of developers * number of bugs)
  • Testing Labor = (additional hours required * average salary * amount of testing needed * number of bugs)
  • Customer Support Labor = (additional hours required * average salary * number of calls/emails * number of bugs)
  • Public Relations Labor = (additional hours required * average salary * amount of support needed * severity of bugs)
  • Revenue Loss = (product price * actual sales lost * goodwill)
  • Total = Too Much $$$!

With all the info at your fingertips, don't you think it's a good idea to make sure your product is properly tested BEFORE it ships?