“Most defects end up costing more than it would have cost to prevent them. Defects are expensive when they occur, both the direct costs of fixing the defects and the indirect costs because of damaged relationships, lost business, and lost development time”
Kent Beck, Extreme Programming Explained
The Relative Coat
The cost of fixing and detecting defects in software increases significantly with time spent in the development process. This is because fixing and testing bugs is incredibly risky and costly. The cost of doing so is not just in the form of wasted resources and time, but also in the form of lost opportunities.
The following graph by NIST shows the increase in the effort required to detect and fix defects as the software goes through the various phases of development.
The Cost of bugs in numbers
According to a study contacted by Cambridge Judge Business School MBA project in collaboration with Undo , 26% of developer time is spent fixing and reproducing failing tests, which means that over 600 million developer hours are spent annually fixing and reproducing failing tests.
$61 bil
THE TOTAL VAKUE OF SALARY
SPENT FIXING FAILING TESTS
ANNUALY
620 mil
THE TOTAL OF DEVELOPER
HOURS A YEAR WASTED DEBUGGING SOFTWARE FAILURES
$1.2 tril
THE TOTAL IN ENTERPRISE VALUE LOST FOR SHAREHOLDERS A YEAR