Software bugs cost U.S. companies billions of dollars annually.
Experts say developers "hit or miss" attitude is to blame.

Why does corporate America cut the software industry so much slack? If manufacturing in general took the same slipshod approach that software developers and vendors have over the past decade, businesses would be demanding government regulations to solve the problem before any further campaign contribution checks were cut.

Software bugs are so prevalent and so detrimental that they cost the U.S. economy nearly $60 billion annually, according to a May 2002 study commissioned by the U.S. Department of Commerce's National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). At the national level, more than half of those costs fell on the software users and the remainder hit the software developers and vendors themselves.

The NIST study found that although all errors cannot be removed, more than one-third of these costs-an estimated $22.2 billion could be eliminated by an improved testing infrastructure that enables earlier and more effective identification and removal of software defects. These are the savings associated with finding an increased percentage of errors closer to the development stages in which they are introduced. Currently, more than half of all errors are not found until "downstream" in the development process or during post-sale software use.

"Companies don't incorporate quality into the software development life cycle," says John Fox, vice president of SWAT Solutions, a Plymouth-based software testing firm. Fox agrees with the NIST study report's assessment that many vendors do not include testing into every aspect of software development, from design through deployment. This despite research that shows that identifying and fixing bugs before release is much less costly than correcting these errors after the product has been released...