Despite difficult times, pandemic and conflict, software continues to be developed, to grow more and more into our daily lives and to become immersed in the digital economy at a scale and ubiquity we may not realize. Organizations continue on their digital transformation journey and so innovation and new software-based products grow and evolve, to provide greater convenience, connections and agility to our lives.
Organizations in turn try to achieve high velocity in delivering business value to their customers and consumers through faster software production with as little sacrifice to quality as possible. But this has been difficult to achieve; companies have found it difficult to prioritize investments in the quality area, more understood as a cost center. While these companies can monetize the business value of speed, they rarely measure the economic impact of poor quality.
To provide a glimpse of the economic impact that poor software quality has on business and society, we highlight three relevant studies in the worldwide software development community:
- The Economic Impacts of Inadequate Infrastructure for Software Testing — NIST (U.S. National Institute of Standards & Technology), May 2002.
The objective of this study was to investigate the economic impact of inadequate infrastructure for software testing in the United States, published almost 20 years ago. Based on a survey of software developers and users, the annual national costs of an inadequate software testing infrastructure were estimated at $59.5 billion. More than half of these costs were borne by software users in the form of error prevention and mitigation activities. The remaining costs were borne by software developers and also reflected the additional testing resources that were consumed due to inadequate testing tools and methods. - Software Fails Watch 5th Edition — Tricentis, February 2018
In 2018, Tricentis compiled the previous year’s biggest headlines around software bugs, usability flaws, and vulnerabilities. The resulting statistics were alarming, to say the least. That year’s report identified 606 software flaws published in the English-language media, impacting half the world’s population (3.7 billion people), $1.7 trillion in assets, and 314 companies. It was estimated that such impact in the United States was one-third of that amount that year, or a little over $600 billion, 10 times NIST’s 2002 estimate. In an upcoming post we will present some of these headlines that marked the news of 2017. - The Cost of Poor Software Quality in the US: A 2020 Report — CONSORTIUM FOR INFORMATION & SOFTWARE QUALITYTM (CISQTM), January 2021.
For the year 2020, this study determined that the total cost of poor software quality (CPSQ) in the US was $2.08 trillion. As the study rightly points out, in 2011 Marc Andreeson proclaimed that “Software is eating the world” — which is still the case, but much more voraciously after the pandemic. That scenario doesn’t seem to be cooling down, digital transformation is accelerating and being fueled by more software solutions.
What all these studies seek to highlight is that many digital transformation initiatives are failing not because of a focus on technology and business, but because of poor software engineering and lack of investment in quality.
If you would like to know how we help important companies in the national and international scenario to promote an adequate software testing infrastructure, with significant loss reduction, please contact us (https://dbservices.pt).
