Two things contribute to unhappy customers: bugs and late delivery. A bug is generally referred to as a feature in the application that does not work according to the customer’s expectations. This can be due to an unspecified or misunderstood requirement or just a mistake in the development of the software. Either way, bugs not only frustrate the customer, they considerably expand the project’s cost and timeline.

Making an effort to catch bugs at the earliest point in the life cycle will result in a higher return on investment (ROI). The cost of fixing a bug differs depending on the stage of development it is caught in.

• Requirements Stage: Bugs caught in the requirements writing stage simply cost the time to rewrite the requirement. Time spent in this stage is usually constant.

• Coding Stage: Bugs caught here require developer hours. Time varies but is considerably less than fixing a bug found by someone else. When a bug is found during this stage, the developer discovers it, already understands the problem, and often knows how to fix it.

• Integration Stage: Bugs caught here require developer and other system engineer hours. Time is usually at least twice as much, since the problem occurs at a higher level and there is a need to figure out which exact code or configuration is wrong. 

• Testing Stage: Bugs caught here require developer, system engineer, PM, and QA hours. The process is much larger than before. Now things need to be tracked and prioritized. This now requires finding reproduction steps, submitting a bug, prioritizing the bug, meeting with developers, fixing the bug, pushing the fix to the test environment, verifying the fix, and tracking the changes of the bug in the system.

• Production Stage: Bugs caught here require developer, support, system engineer, PM, customer, and QA hours. This process always involves all of the roles. It requires more planning and more prioritizing than in the testing stage. Usually a phone call comes to support, and they decide if it's a bug or if it’s working as designed. The customer is notified, the PM is contacted, and then the process in the testing stage is followed. 

  Add Comment