Evaluating the cost of software quality

The explosive growth of the software industry in recent years has focused attention on the problems long associated with software development: uncontrollable costs, missed schedules, and unpredictable quality. To remain competitive, software firms must deliver high quality products on time and within budget. However, to bring their products more quickly to market, software managers may avoid quality improvement processes such as design reviews and code inspections, believing that these processes only add time to the development cycle. Certainly the economics of improving quality are not well understood in the software development world. Software quality improvement should be viewed as an investment. It is possible to spend too much on software quality. Thus, it is important that companies financially justify each software quality improvement effort. It is important to monitor software conformance and nonconformance costs so that conformance policies can be adjusted to reduce the total costs of software quality.