Errors in software design take on many forms and happen to even the most successful businesses. Apple, for instance, suffered considerable embarrassment in 2012 when it botched an upgrade to the Apple iOS 6 and released a map app whose maps were all incorrect. More problems emerged over the next few years with Apple’s follow-up iOS 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4. For an entertaining list of 15 worst software glitches of all time, check out this blog.
It can affect your bottom-line
Software quality can have a serious effect on the bottom-line. The global economy loses around $3 trillion a year due to malfunctions caused by defective software. Transnational organized crime, by comparison, only takes around $870 billion a year from the global economy. Cybercrime only costs the world economy $445 million a year.
Not to downplay the menace that criminal elements (organized or not) really do pose to businesses. But think about these numbers. If botched software projects were a business, it would be the largest enterprise on Earth.
It can delay your project launch
At the very least, having software quality issues will force you to go back and redo work on the product.
The backtracking and the fixing is the most problematic part. It will be more expensive depending on how late in the process the software error emerges. Do you spot it at the very beginning, in the design phase? Or do you only catch it in later on?
For your sake (and your customers’), it had best be the very first phase – when you’re setting the requirements. With each following phase, the cost of fixing a software error rises fast. If a problem is identified in the early stages, then majority of the product can still be built with using the correct specs. There will be some extra work involved, but it’s better than the problem only becoming known after the product has already gone to market. That’s when customer complaints, order returns, product recalls happen, and your reputation takes a sudden dip.
How to avoid these costs?
If you put in the necessary time and effort up front to monitor your software development processes and methods from start to finish, you can avoid the costs associated with bad quality. Proper methods for quality assurance and software testing are all vital parts of the equation.
These efforts cost extra investment of time and resources:
- understand how to measure software quality,
- measure quality as you develop,
- get the right tools to do it,
- work with QAs that know what they’re talking about
Do these things and they will save you money in the end: They will ensure that you don’t have to spend larger sums going back and fixing a defective software product after development.
Creating a high-quality custom software product isn’t always cheap. But it is definitely less costly than creating a poor-quality one.
So how important is software quality? It’s so important we wrote a whole guide on how to measure software quality.
And…in case you don’t feel like reading, here’s an infographic about the importance of software quality. CLICK to get it to move:
