Economics
A study conducted by NIST in 2002 reports that software bugs cost the U.S. economy $59.5 billion annually. More than a third of this cost could be avoided if better software testing was performed.
It is commonly believed that the earlier a defect is found, the cheaper it is to fix it. The following table shows the cost of fixing the defect depending on the stage it was found. For example, if a problem in the requirements is found only post-release, then it would cost 10–100 times more to fix than if it had already been found by the requirements review. With the advent of modern continuous deployment practices and cloud-based services, the cost of re-deployment and maintenance may lessen over time.
| Cost to fix a defect | Time detected | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Requirements | Architecture | Construction | System test | Post-release | ||
| Time introduced | Requirements | 1× | 3× | 5–10× | 10× | 10–100× |
| Architecture | - | 1× | 10× | 15× | 25–100× | |
| Construction | - | - | 1× | 10× | 10–25× | |
Read more about this topic: Software Testing
Famous quotes containing the word economics:
“The animals that depend on instinct have an inherent knowledge of the laws of economics and of how to apply them; Man, with his powers of reason, has reduced economics to the level of a farce which is at once funnier and more tragic than Tobacco Road.”
—James Thurber (1894–1961)
“Religion and art spring from the same root and are close kin. Economics and art are strangers.”
—Willa Cather (1876–1947)
“There is no such thing as a free lunch.”
—Anonymous.
An axiom from economics popular in the 1960s, the words have no known source, though have been dated to the 1840s, when they were used in saloons where snacks were offered to customers. Ascribed to an Italian immigrant outside Grand Central Station, New York, in Alistair Cooke’s America (epilogue, 1973)