Company A is in a rush to get its product to market. Management doesn't recognize that engineering will continue to find defects through development and post-release, because Company A hasn't taken a systems approach to looking for problems. Company B's management has seen several disastrous releases, and they're now willing to spend a little more time finding and fixing defects because the company can't upgrade software once it is in the field. Cultures and their implications I find Weinberg's 2 culture patterns particularly effective when describing the implications of the cost of fixing a defect. Problems are fixed with great personal effort, not a systemic approach.
Teams fix problems, generally after a severe problem has occurred.
Problems are brought out into the open, discussed, and resolved in an orderly way. Company C is developing a larger, multithreaded application, and is rushing to make a market window. In calculating the costs I have rounded slightly, because I care about the magnitude, not the specific dollars and cents, of the cost. In Company A, during system test, seven people fixed only 143 out of 245 defects found, over a period of 65 days. Because Company A has a variable culture, it was surprised that its employees found more defects than they could easily fix.