From - Thu Jun 6 11:11:02 2002 Path: newsfeed.ed.ac.uk!server6.netnews.ja.net!server1.netnews.ja.net!fu-berlin.de!news.maxwell.syr.edu!newsfeed.stanford.edu!postnews1.google.com!not-for-mail From: kuhn@nist.gov (Rick Kuhn) Newsgroups: comp.software-eng,comp.software.testing,comp.specification.misc,comp.security Subject: Impact of inadequate software testing on US economy Date: 5 Jun 2002 11:55:53 -0700 Organization: http://groups.google.com/ Lines: 34 Message-ID: NNTP-Posting-Host: 129.6.54.202 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-Trace: posting.google.com 1023303354 22285 127.0.0.1 (5 Jun 2002 18:55:54 GMT) X-Complaints-To: groups-abuse@google.com NNTP-Posting-Date: 5 Jun 2002 18:55:54 GMT Xref: newsfeed.ed.ac.uk comp.software-eng:75458 comp.software.testing:48101 comp.specification.misc:2570 NIST has released a new study conducted by the Research Triangle Institute that should be of interest to readers: "The Economic Impacts of Inadequate Infrastructure for Software Testing". Comments and discussion are welcome. http://www.nist.gov/director/prog-ofc/report02-3.pdf Rick Kuhn From the summary: NIST engaged the Research Triangle Institute (RTI) to assess the cost to the U.S. economy of inadequate software testing infrastructure. Inadequate testing is defined as failure to identify and remove software bugs in real time. Over half of software bugs are currently not found until ?downstream? in the development process leading to significant economic costs. RTI identified a set of quality attributes and used them to construct metrics for estimating the cost of an inadequate testing infrastructure. Two in depth case studies were conducted. In the manufacturing sector, transportation equipment industries were analyzed. Data were collected from software developers (CAD/CAM/CAE and product data management vendors) and from users (primarily automotive and aerospace companies). In the service sector, financial services were analyzed with data collected again from software developers (routers and switches, financial electronic data interchange, and clearinghouse) and from users (banks and credit unions). ...the annual cost to these two major industry groups from inadequate software infrastructure is estimated to be $5.85 billion. Similarities across industries with respect to software development and use and, in particular, software testing labor costs allowed a projection of the cost to the entire U.S. economy. Using the per-employee impacts for the two case studies, an extrapolation to other manufacturing and service industries yields an approximate estimate of $59.5 billion as the annual cost to the nation of inadequate software testing infrastructure.