Bugs in software are pesky for the coder and possibly even more so for the end user, but who knew that they were also expensive? According to the Nat’l Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), bugs in software put a drain of over $59 billion on the US economy annually.
As one might expect, NIST reported that most of that cost is absorbed by the end user with the rest being incurred by developers and vendors. While NIST fingered growing program complexity and marketing (among others) as causes of the buggy software, they said the biggest reason for buggy software is a lack of ways to measure software quality.
Nearly 80 percent of development costs are spent on debugging already, so one might wonder if the consumers and market are really the ones to blame for buggy software. After all, if we’d rather buy inexpensive software than quality software, why should developers build anything else? If we would actually prefer to pay more, but get a quality product, why don’t we demand it?
[Source: InfoWorld]