Carl Bruiners Agile / IT Development Consultant

Reap the QA rewards by reducing defects

Reducing software defects has huge rewards for a business. I recently put together a slide on the commercial benefit of reducing defects, to quantify this as a cost to the business I put together a simple demonstration on the cost to the business.

Base

• £58 p/d
• 10 incoming defects p/w
• 2 days per defect to fix

If you reduce the total incoming defects by 40% in the first year you'll save just over £22k, but it is completely feasible to achieve a 99% reduction in your incoming defects and your saving would be £55k p/a.

Any managers reading this will be over the moon, but the developers / testers and release managers will be scratching their heads @ how to achieve this. Defects only occur if you allow them to escape in the first place, look at your testing strategy, automate as much of your testing as possible, achieve continuous integration and aim for continuous delivery. Achieving a 99% reduction would be easier in some environments than others; i.e. a web application is going to be far easier to drastically reduce the incoming defects than a legacy installed application on the desktop (as you may not have the capability to upgrade / update desktop applications as frequently).