How much does bad QA cost?

Overview

In today’s fast-paced digital landscape, software quality isn’t just an option; it is more likely a requirement for a competitive solution.

Based on our experience and backed by the QA reports below, at TAA, we understand that ignoring software quality leads to extra costs for your organisation. These costs range from reputational damage to lost revenue, high technical debt, poor job performance, employee disengagement, and customer churn.

The price of poor software quality is quite often in the range of scary high figures, and what is worse, in most cases, it is a cost mainly invisible to the management roles, who can not take proper corrective actions.

How much?

The Consortium for Information & Software Quality (CISQ) estimated the cost of poor software quality at $2.08 trillion in 2020. This report includes costs from software failures, unsuccessful IT projects, and legacy system problems. By investing in robust test automation, organisations improve their solutions and primarily protect their bottom line.

Basics of Cost-Optimisation

A software organisation must plant a suitable set of actions to enhance software quality while reducing long-term costs. Some of the areas to analyse are:

1. Strategic Test Automation Planning

An organisation must tailor strategies that facilitate enough test coverage while minimising resource expenditure, thus ensuring that each development team gets the most value from all the testing activities.

2. Comprehensive Automated Testing

All automated test solutions must cover various test types like functional, regression, performance, and load testing. Moreover, the developers must keep the test’s complexity low and current with the business logic while the tests catch costly bugs before they reach production.

3. CI/CD Integration

By integrating testing into the CI/CD pipeline, the team can build fast feedback loops to report issues earlier, reducing the cost of fixes by up to 100 times compared to post-release detection.

4. Optimised Test Environments

Any test automation solution needs an efficient test environment that mirrors production, thus preventing costly discrepancies between testing and live scenarios.

5. Intelligent Test Data Management

Test data management systems are paramount to ensure the test suite is constantly running with relevant, up-to-date data, avoiding expensive false positives or negatives.

6. Performance Testing and Optimisation

Some of the most significant losses in software projects are due to low-performance solutions. A profitable development team needs to detail a rigorous performance test solution to prevent production failures that result in high costs when the application is under high load conditions.

7. Knowledge Transfer and Support

A solid Software Development Life Cycle is sustained on top of high-quality standards for long-term maintainability of the artefacts produced by the team. These standards involve having sound documentation systems to keep all the relevant information up to date with the minimum effort. By constantly investing in QA training, the team empowers the organisation to maintain those high-quality standards while reducing dependencies on external resources.

QA Benefits

A critical factor in optimising the SDLC is hiring or partnering with experts who understand the crucial balance between quality and cost-effectiveness. Those experts provide knowhow and deliver solutions that directly and indirectly impact the bottom line at many different points:

Reduced Time-to-Market: Automated processes cut development time by up to 80%, allowing the team to release faster without compromising quality.
Improved Resource Allocation: Automation frees the team to focus on high-value deliverables while maximising productivity.
Enhanced Customer Satisfaction: Delivering higher-quality software will increase customer retention and significantly reduce customer support costs.
Solid Risk Mitigation: A comprehensive testing methodology helps the organisation avoid the many business risks associated with software failures.

Invest in Quality, Invest in Success

Implementing sufficient test automation costs a fraction of what the organisation might have to pay, monetarily or with time, for software failures and lost business opportunities.

Let’s work together to elevate your software quality, reduce costs, and drive your business forward. The path to efficient, high-quality software starts here, with TAA.

Claims: The claim that “the cost of poor software quality in the US alone was estimated at $2.08 trillion in 2020” is sourced from a report by the Consortium for Information & Software Quality (CISQ).

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