How much are defects costing you?

Reduce the cost of defects through continuous quality

Software defects are often expensive. Better quality code, which is free from defects reduces the maintenance cost, downtime and improves the performance of an application. The earlier in the development lifecycle defects are found, the more economical the overall delivery will be.  

The relative cost of fixing defects grows significantly through the software development lifecycle. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST ) found that compared to early detection and fix,  resolving the defects in production can cost 30 times more and up to 60 times more in case of security defects.    

The chart above shows how the cost of fixes increases as the defects are found late in the SDLC - Source NIST

Discovering defects in production - The  real cost  ❗❗

It is not uncommon to see a new feature released in production introduce an unwanted bug. The users who had their critical functionality working until yesterday start complaining. Developers scramble to find the root cause. Roll back plan gets discussed and an emergency change is raised to fix the issue. This all results in a lot of productive time wasted by everyone involved.  

Finding defects in production is associated with high costs, not only monetarily but reputationally too. Degradation of services often results in additional load on application teams as well as unhappy users or customers.  

We also must account for all the in-flight development activity that is impacted because of the focus shift to production defects. Losing critical resources to fixing the production defects often results in unwanted delays in the planned development work.  

Finding defects during  testing – Is it better, really?    🤷‍♂️

Finding defects during testing and before the features go-live is much more desirable than after the production release. This, however, is also not free of costs. Finding a critical defect could jeopardize the planned release date. The critical developer time is also key as feature rework does not always get accounted for during project planning.  

Defects fixed during testing also often result in other defects accidentally introduced elsewhere in the application. These unintentional defects may not be easy to discover unless significant time is invested in regression testing, as the testers often focus on testing the fixes and not repeat the full test cycles.   

Find and fix defects during development  🙂

 Given all the overhead and risks involved with defect fixes at any stage later than the development, it makes sense to invest in tools that help developers in not just finding and fixing issues with the code but also utilizing the guidance on best practices and minimizing the introduction of software defects.  

Good quality code can be achieved by adopting processes including manual code reviews by experienced developers but is often time-consuming and slows down the overall progress.  

Continuous Quality 😁

By adopting a continuous quality approach to software development you can catch and stop defects early in the SDLC. 

We recently launched vt:codeworks - an application that runs in your ServiceNow instance and continuously scans for code bugs, code smells, best practice violations in real time. 

It’s loaded with 200+ rules to detect code smells and bugs and you can configure your own rules to enforce coding standards. It's available on the ServiceNow Store and you can find out more at www.vorto.co/codeworks