The cost of unresolved bugs

Most projects deliver solutions with bugs. When projects are working with tight and mandatory deadlines there might be a lot of known and documented defects as a result just prior to a release. Other projects might be in a position where they can postpone a their release and bring down the number of bugs. Think a bit about the consequence and cost of those defects related to actually delivering a less bug-infected solution a bit later.

The cost of any unresolved bug does at least include the following tasks: 

• Impact analysis (money, time, material)
• Workaround analysis and testing
• SOP documentation
• Re-plannning. 

On top of this there is at least some documentation that has to be updated twice (one for the bug version, and a next one when the bug has been fixed). There might be additional costs that are less visible. A bug might prevent progress on other tasks in a project and so on. Users might need re-training on top of SOP documentation in order to follow the new SOP. And finally there is the grey zone - what if we didn't analyse and understand the workaround completely.

Nevertheless, what might seem like a relatively correct and easy decision might actually add more work and more costs and more uncertainty to a given release.