Debugging Software

When the United States fell asleep at the wheel in terms of product quality, one of the “re-awakenings” came in the form of a book called Quality is Free by Phil Crosby. His core principle was that any investment in quality improvement would return more than the program’s cost in terms of organization efficiency and customer satisfaction. Hence the title of his book.
Our co-founder Jonathan Lindo is currently the featured columnist for Sticky Minds (http://www.stickyminds.com/) where he discusses the economics of software quality in the context of automated testing. Based on the experiences and feedback from our customers, Jonathan has done an excellent job of highlighting changes that are driving software testing to increased levels of automation and a “time and motion” breakdown of the costs of software defects throughout the find and fix process. Given the time and resources tied up in documenting, communicating, replicating and diagnosing a defect, there is a great deal of savings to be had in improving the process.
The article has already received very thoughtful and supportive feedback, mostly along the lines that the cost estimates may be too conservative. If that’s the case, software quality is even “free-er” than we thought.