According to a report by the Systems Sciences Institute at IBM, ‘the cost to fix an error found after product release was 4-5 times as much as one uncovered during design, and up to 100 times more than one identified in the maintenance phase’. Mostly, the cost of a bug increases depending upon how far down the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) the issue is found. If a defect is detected in production the code needs to be sent to the beginning of the SDLC, so that testers can restart with the agile development cycle. QA teams often need to change the software development approach to accommodate a code fix, which can in return cause another change in the code. So, it does not only cost a bug more, than to fix as it moves through another round of SDLC. But a different code change could also delay, which adds cost to that code change too. This is why teams use issue tracking tools, to track defects/issues at earlier stages and prevent huge costs on rectifying them.
Following are a few practical examples of costly software bugs:
NASA – Mariner 1
In 1962, Mariner 1 spacecraft was launched and the US made its first attempt to send it to Venus. Just when the Mariner 1 made it past Cape Canaveral, a software bug caused the rocket to get off the course. A NASA ground safety officer issued a self-destruct command, which destroyed the spacecraft 290 seconds after its takeoff. Officials reported that the omission of a hyphen in the coded computer instructions resulted in incorrect guidance of signals being sent to the Mariner 1. A loss of $18 million was reported at the time. Issue tracking tools help in finding faults in a software application that can prevent such accidents.
Knight Capital Group
Knight Capital Group Inc., is one of America’s largest trading companies, that mistakenly sent out more than 4 million stock orders in August 2012. These orders were supposed to be spread out in a couple of days, and reserving the trades cost almost half a billion dollars. A group of investors saved their reputation by paying $400 million, otherwise Knight Capital would have been bankrupt. The officials found out that this issue occurred due to a code change that was not deployed to all the servers. One server was missed that caused the server to use old code, creating millions of orders at once. In two days, the company lost 75% of its shares due to a defect in its software. It caused over $440 million losses, which was almost 4 times what the company earned in 2011.
Toyota
In August 2009, a Lexus ES 350 accelerated out of control at speeds to exceed 100mph. Toyota dealers were instructed to remove the gas pedals and update their computers with a new program to address the issue. The cars had a software bug that caused a lag in the car’s anti-lock brake system.
We have seen a few examples of how issues and bugs can be costly for companies. They can cause large enterprises to lose their business and even lead to bankruptcy. Thus, it is important to use issue tracking tools and detect bugs in the earlier stages of the SDLC.
