One of the items which comes up in most Quality Assurance discussions is the determination of what Return on Investment Quality Assurance provides. It can be hard to justify and obviously depends on the Costing Model used in your organisation. The factors in the Costing Model may differ but the overall trend is always the same. Early Quality Assurance (see last blog) alway pays.
Here are some of the places where and how Quality Assurance pays:
- An error found at Requirements time will be much cheaper to fix there rather than later in the lifecycle. Estimates range from 10% of the later cost down to far less than 0.1% for even moderately complex systems.
- Similarly an error found at Design time has a ratio that is slightly less than Requirements but still substantial.
- Inclusion of Quality Assurance at an early stage will lead to root cause analysis of repeated errors saving thousands of dollars in testing and repetition of test cases.
- Inclusion of Quality Assurance at an early stage allows the definition and construction of an environment suitable for testing when the code becomes available. Environments may be able to be shared leading to cost savings or, at the very least, they can be designed with all the testing considerations included up front.
The above are only a few of the places where Quality Assurance can save many thousands of dollars on the project. There are many more which could be defined and calculated.
Our next blog will look at how Quality Assurance can provide valuable input and how that is made clear to the users.
Take a look at some of the seminars that we offer that address this situation and see if they apply to your situation. Quality Assurance is exceedingly Cost-Efficient.
Contact us for further information.
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