Optimizing the Cost of Software Quality - A Path to Delivery Excellence

There have been a lot of challenges in monetizing the quality and failure cost generically due to the nature of software industry. An organization must monetize the benefits and cost of improvement programs. Measuring and reporting the cost of quality (CoQ) is an important pre-requisite for achieving delivery excellence. CoQ is computed by summing up price of conformance plus non-conformance into prevention, appraisal and failure cost incurred for delivering a product. The cost of software quality tries to quantify what is the cost incurred for quality as against each dollar that has been spend for development. Generic industry trend shows about 40% towards fixing and controlling quality, the optimal suggested industry benchmark is around 20-25%. The objective of CoQ model is to measure and control the cost of poor quality and provide tools that could enable delivery excellence.