In the high-stakes software world, a single bug can be a multi-million dollar mistake, or worse. Just ask NASA, you can see on this article in Wikipedia that someone put together a list of unfortunate space-related bugs, amongst others.
In today’s app-driven economy, downtime and bugs directly translates to dollars lost.
Your software goes down, your app has bugs, you start receiving emails and calls from your customers and users..and worst of all, 1-star reviews!
In a market where winners and losers are determined in milliseconds, running on buggy software is pain waiting to happen.
It was calculated that approximately 4 billion people have encountered some kind of software bug in their lifetime. That means that almost 1 in 2 people in the world have experienced software failures, and thus stress. Now I don’t know what you think, but that’s a lot of people suffering from bugs, and a lot of bug-fixing done by developers around the globe!
The costs of software bugs
According to a study by Stripe and Harris Poll, 79% of developers say bugs cost over $1,000 to fix on average, while 49% estimate the cost at $5,000 or more.
The damage adds up across industries – a report from Tricentis pegged the global cost of software failures at $1.7 trillion in 2017, meanwhile on this infographic they calculated the cost sky-rocketing to $2.8 trillion in 2018
Going back to NASA (and I am sorry to pick on them because I love NASA), a bug in the code controlling NASA’s Mars Climate Orbiter led to the total loss of the $125 million spacecraft in 1999.
On the other side of the table a financial investment group called Knight Capital spent $440 million related to a trading software problem that sent its share price plummeting 75% in 45 minutes.
It’s clear that bugs can deal devastating blows to budgets and reputations.
By prioritizing robust QA processes, companies can detect and resolve issues early, saving millions in potential disruptions and damages.
