This is old news! Numerous articles have been written and countless research papers have studied the impact of software bugs on the corporate bottom-line, as well as on the overall economy.
You can read all about it here, here, here and here. There’s is a cool “Cost of Bugs” infographic we made about the issue – But you’ll be wasting your time.
Bottom-line: bugs are expensive. VERY expensive.
According to a research conducted at Cambridge University, published in 2013, the global cost of debugging software has risen to $312 billion annually.
According to the research: on average, developers spend 50% of their programming time finding and fixing bugs. When projecting this figure onto the total cost of employing software developers, this inefficiency is estimated to cost the global economy $312 billion annually. To put this in perspective, since 2008, Eurozone bailout payments to Greece, Ireland, Portugal, and Spain have totalled $591 billion. These bailout payments amount to less than half money spent on debugging over the same 5 year period.
The premise that “bugs are an integral part of coding and always will be” is childish ignorance – if not worse. People have lost their lives due to software bugs that could have – and should have – been detected BEFORE product release, and even BEFORE it reached QA.
It has been proven that bugs, especially regression bugs, can be avoided in the coding process with unit testing, yet many developers still feel that the responsibility for THEIR code is with QA.
WRONG. Developer Testing is all about PERSONAL & PROFESSIONAL RESPONSIBILITY: to yourself, your team, your company and your end-user.
Unit testing is just one part of it – fully understanding the debugging process is crucial in becoming a better coding professional.
There is no excuse for handing off poor-quality code to QA or to the customer. Don’t lay the blame with the bosses or QA – take the initiative: unit test!
Want to improve productivity? Try Isolator for free – and see how easy unit testing can be!
Image “A proper English gentleman expressing his patriotism” taken from STORMBRINGER – Sean Linnane‘s blog
