Should you invest in software quality?

For 95% of companies, the answer is: No.

This is just wrong. Software quality does matter and this question makes it sound like a binary answer. But it is not. The correct question is how much should you invest.

Maybe software quality doesn’t matter that much to your company, but if the cost of improving the quality is a small amount you would be stupid not to invest. But then there might be something else that would cost you a lot to improve the quality only a little bit, then it might not be worthwhile.

Everything is a trade-off, there are very few binary answers like this article they are responding to suggests.

I feel like this is only true of internal or enterprise software where switching is expensive. For business to consumer, the impact of bugs can cause a company to go under or at least become a zombie. For any type of company, the thread of a competitor is high and can cause your company to stagnant and slowly go under or bleed and rapidly go under.

There is a real impact to a high amount of bugs, it just doesn’t happen in one quarter. It happens over years and results in higher stress foe the developers. A stagnating company doesn’t hire. It doesn’t give raises and slashes benefits. A lot of terrible things happen before a company goes under. We can watch Twitter speed running this.