Software quality blunders cost industry billions

The cost of poorly designed software is astronomical and can affect all levels of an organisation including sales, customers, suppliers and even the organisation`s reputation. A recent estimate puts the cost of defective software at between $60 billion and $100 billion in the US alone each year.

One of the reasons for problematic programs making their way into organisations is that software developers don`t dedicate sufficient effort to thorough application testing prior to deployment into production environments.

"Exhaustive testing is clearly something that cannot effectively be done manually - large, complex applications can have millions of lines of intricate machine code. Pinpointing problematic code could be like locating a contact lens on a cricket field," says Paul Wandrag, product manager at Compuware SA.

He explains that most professional programmers make an error for every 10 lines of code they write. That`s potentially a staggering 100 000 errors in an application of a million lines - and it takes just three or four defects per thousand lines to make a program perform unacceptably.

"Removing these problems manually clearly presents an insurmountable task. Furthermore, testing skills are usually lacking or considered superfluous as developers often prefer to spew out code and leave testing and quality assurance for the testing cycle. This compounds the problem as many latent defects can go unnoticed," explains Wandrag.

Automated software quality assurance is the answer to this quandary. However, despite the availability of solutions like Compuware`s QACenter, only around 25% of applications deployed on distributed systems are effectively tested using modern tools and techniques, according to research organisation Gartner.

"Management systems, training and techniques for developers are simply not designed to do quality testing. Automated testing has to become a critical component of the development cycle, giving programmers the opportunity to easily identify and solve problems and even create a library of scripts for re-use, actually speeding up the development process," he says.

Improvements in application testing techniques, using available modern technology, could reduce the cost of poorly designed software by at least a third, according to estimates. That translates to a saving of over $22 billion in the US alone.

But to solve their software quality issues, Wandrag says organisations need to look for complete software quality solutions, not just testing tools. This is essential to enhance the testing lifecycle to try and keep up with modern software development lifecycles. Faster time to market development models put more strain on testing in general and employing manual testing alone is not enough to ensure total quality and risk management across the entire testing effort.

"To ensure the cleanest possible code enters production, developers must select products and services that address quality issues across the application lifecycle from requirements definition, design, development, QA, deployment and production operations," he concludes.