The cost of errors in software development: evidence from industry

The search for and correction of errors in software are often time consuming and expensive components of the total cost of software development. The current research investigates to what extent these costs of software error detection and correction contribute to the total cost of software. We initiated the research reported here with the collection of a sample of transactions recording progress on one phase of development of a set of software programs. Each of these projects represented the completion of an identical phase of development (i.e., country localisation) for a different country. This enabled each project to be compared with the other, and provided an unusually high degree of control over the data collection and analysis in real-world empirical study. The research findings relied on programmers' self-assessment of the severity of errors discovered. It found that serious errors have less influence on total cost than errors that were classified as less serious but which ...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2002
• Where: JSS
• Authors: J. Christopher Westland
• Keywords: JSS 2002, Research, Software, Total Cost