Finding faults early

There are several benefits of finding faults in a software system, program or application early during the development phase. Two famous researchers from the famous software engineering institute or SEI as it is called in short form, carried out a research to find benefits of detecting or finding faults early while the software project is in development phase.

There are numerous benefits of finding faults early in some software system or application. Below listed are some of the observations of the research:

- Around 70 percent of the total errors and bugs creep in to the software system during the early stages of the software development cycle. Out of these 70 percent faults, only 3.5 percent faults are found.
- Around 80 percent of the errors and faults are discovered in the later stages of the software development cycle.
- The cost of fixing faults early was recorded around the rate of 25x.
- The cost of fixing faults later in the development stages was recorded to be around 16x or sometimes even higher.

According to the finding of the results of the research, one can save himself/ herself over a large percentage on rework and software repair works by finding and fixing the records early during the initial stages of the software development cycle. Since the quality of the software is elusive, it is difficult to define it and also impossible to measure it.