In 2016, the global software failure cost crossed $1.1 trillion because of software bugs. These failures were reported by 363 companies and affected almost 4.4 billion consumers. Majority of these incidents could have been avoided, but the software passed onto the customers without proper quality assurance.
In addition to this, IBM found out that the cost of fixing the errors after the release is four to five times more than if it is detected during the designing phase. It becomes a hundred times more expensive when the errors are identified during the maintenance phase.
Therefore, the cost goes up as the bug passes by the software development lifecycle. According to IBM, the cost bug fixing would be $100 in the initial phase, $1500 in the QA testing phase, and $10,000 during the production phase.
IBM pointed out that the software bug expenses not only impact the internal business operations but also cause the loss of an average $2.3 billion of shareholder value on the very first day.
So, a software bug affects everything such as customer loyalty, brand reputation, and profitability.
Also Read: How Valuable Is Software Testing?
Companies Who Suffered Losses
NASA
NASA launched the Mars Climate Orbiter in 1998 to see the atmosphere and climate of Mars. One day the Orbiter got lost into space and the communication got cut-off. There are so many things that could go wrong while dealing with spacecraft engineering.
Nevertheless, if detected and fixed on time, the error could have been easy. The $125 million spacecraft apparently revolved very close to Mars’ surface and broke due to the engineering team failure to transform their measurements from U.S. units to metric. But this was not just the one time that blunders during programing destroyed a NASA rocket.
AT&T
AT&T failed to meet the rudimentary requirements of their consumers as they attempted to contact their family, friends, and airports, in January 1990. People got furious after experiencing a total of 200,000 lost airline reservations and 75 million missed phone calls.
AT&T initially thought someone hacked their system. However, the ascended because of the software bug. AT&T had only upgraded the code, but the variation of speed ended up being harmful to a system that could not sustain. So, one-liner buggy code caused a loss to AT&T of about $60 million.
Apple
Majority of the customers believed that Apple can never do anything wrong. However, in 2016 this believe proved to be wrong when they replaced Google Maps with iOS 6. This brought a halt to customer’s limitless admiration. It was nothing more than a corporate politics to gain more market share. As a result, Apple had to make compensation to this because it was causing negative publicity.
Apple wanted to release the latest and the greatest map app, as early as possible. In this process, they made a few inexcusable lapses in navigation causing the #ios6apocalypse. As a consequence, Apple Maps had false location data, warped graphics, duplicated islands, flattened landmark, disappeared buildings, and erased cities.
Even though the financial loss was never accredited to this absence of judgment, it made customers switch to competitors.
The moral of the story is that you should test your software at initial stages to avoid any costs. In such situations, kualitee is there to help you out in detecting and resolving the bugs.