We all know that if bugs are caught in the early stages of the Software Development Life Cycle, it costs much less to fix them. The Systems Sciences Institute at IBM reported that it cost 15x more to fix a bug found during the testing phase than to fix one identified during the design phase.
While at the Coding Stage: Bugs require mainly the developer time to fix them; during the Production Stage they need developer, support, system engineer, PM, and QA’s time as it involve more planning, prioritizing, fixing and testing than in the earlier stages.
But unfortunately, the time is not the only loss that bugs can cause:
1. Financial and human losses
- In April 2015, Starbucks was forced to close about 60 % of stores in the U.S and Canada due to a software failure in its POS(point-of-sale) system. At one point the store served coffee for free as they were unable to process the transactions and lost millions in sales.
- Nissan have to recall over 1 million cars from the market due to a software failure in the airbag sensory detectors. There has been reported two accident due to this problem.
- A bug in the Intel Pentium Chip’s programming caused it to incorrectly divide floating-point numbers and caused a loss of $475 million.
- Knight , one of the biggest American stock markets almost went bankrupt due to a single software error. Because of the bug, the stock quotations declined by 75%, and the company lost around $440 million.
- In 1985, Canada’s Therac-25 radiation therapy machine malfunctioned due to software bug and delivered lethal radiation doses to patients, leaving 3 people dead and critically injuring 3 others.
- China Airlines Airbus A300 crashed due to defects in the Flight Control Computers and the Automatic Flight System on April 26, 1994, killing 264 people.
These are just a few examples of the most expensive and dangerous bugs existed so far, that changed the way we are looking today at SOFTWARE TESTING.
2. Data breaches
Nowadays, data is becoming one of the most valuable assets.
That`s why People are looking for trusted products that they can rely on, keeping their personal information and data safe while satisfying their needs.
But, with the emergence of more advanced technology, cybercriminals have also found more ways to get into the system of many organizations.
Therefore, companies, governments, and other entities end up encountering breaches they never anticipated would happen and will completely destroy a career or even an entire corporation.
- In 2014, Yahoo announced that hackers had stolen personal information such as names, email addresses, phone numbers, hashed passwords, birth dates, and security questions and answers for 3 billion accounts.
- The same happened for eBay, between February and March 2014 with 145 million users’ accounts.
- In May of 2018, the social media giant Twitter notified users of a glitch that made all user passwords accessible to the internal network.
- In November 2018, Marriott International announced that hackers had stolen data about approximately 500 million Starwood hotel customers.
Since more and more businesses are currently relying their crucial operations on software products, the importance of having a good and reliable security system in place must be taken seriously – now more than ever.
Security shouldn’t represent a new feature, but a requirement included into the system during the design phase of the SDLC(Software Development Life Cycle).
3. Reputational damage
We all know that great user experiences lead to happy customers and therefore to a successful business.
Errors raised without a clear message, Layout bugs due to an unresponsive site, performance issues, etc. are frustrating the clients, making them to leave your website or uninstall your app and therefore to evaluate your business as unprofessional or incompetent.
Every user wants to get a trustworthy and a quality product, that`s why the bugs in your app produce losses not only in business revenue as well as in customer loyalty and brand reputation.
- 88% of users form a negative opinion of a brand if it has a poorly performing app.
- 79% of users are less likely to continue purchasing from a poorly performing platform.
- 48% of users think poor software performance means the authoring company doesn’t care about their users.
- 34% of users will switch to a competitor if they’re not satisfied with your software.
I tink most of you will agree that all the bugs detected later in the system are not just QA`s fault because he/she didn’t detect them during the testing phase.
Responsible of them is the entire team involved in the process, from project managers who didn’t provide the right requirements/specifications and didn’t planed correctly the allocated time for every feature/task/automated tests ; to the developers who didn’t take a few more minutes to analyse one more time the task, review the code and test it.
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