In today’s hyper-competitive global economy, customer satisfaction is increasingly being driven by software. Software is the primary controller of the human interface with electronic devices and substantial parts of the core functionality. For many companies building devices, software is the brand.

As software complexity and application sizes have increased over the past 20 years, application life-cycle costs have increased dramatically. Cambridge University published a report estimating that the global spend on software maintenance and bug fixing is $300 billion, and multiple studies peg the maintenance costs of software at twice the original development cost.

We are spending a fortune on software maintenance and bug fixing because of the poor initial quality of the software being built. To save money, the problems driving these high costs for software maintenance need to be traced back to their root causes, and those root causes need to be fixed.

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