Forums: Discussions for entrepreneurs and small business.

Every year in a software development branch of IT business, significant amount of money is spent on quality. Why is quality so expensive? Is quality so important? Why do companies spend money on Quality Assurance and Software Testing Departments maintenance?

When I think of it I come to conclusion that software quality verification sometimes is even more expensive than software development itself.

Sometimes the quality of software means everything. There are a lot of examples of such systems: the software for railway and air transportation, banking and financial software, healthcare. If something is done wrong in this kind of systems, and if it is not found and corrected on time, it may lead to serious problems in healthcare, or even result in numerous casualties. Often a number of testers taking part in project implementation is more than a number of developers. But every found bug will eventually save money or a company’s reputation.

I took part in this kind of projects. The team had been working on software for medicine distribution for 2 years. There were 9 people who tested the project and only 4 programmers. The price of drugs was rather high, thus a testing team spent much time carrying out their tests with precise care in order to find all the defects that could affect the system. The main requirement for such systems is high accuracy of calculations. And testing engineers repeat the same actions again and again to make sure that everything is correctly calculated. If system had a bug, patient would have received an overdose and possibly died. 

more information you may find there: http://www.andersensoft.com/en/article_quality.php

and how much efforts do you prefere spend on quality?