In reference to the article on unit testing, here is an interesting excerpt from the following article written by one of my former colleagues Paul Julius:

“ The reason I was there was simple. Earlier that year, those same IT managers had performed a series of calculations to estimate how much it cost the department each time a bug made its way out of development, into SIT, into User Acceptance Testing, or all the way into production. For this IT shop, one bug into SIT cost them $12,605 (and you can imagine how much a bug into production would cost.) So, I did some quick math. The burn rate for the developer who introduced the bug was $70 per hour. Since the developer had already fixed the bug and committed the change, I deducted the $70 from the total and ended up with $12,535. Now, it cost them $70 (or less) to fix that one bug, instead of $12,605.”

So I’ll ask you again. Would you rather spend $12000 to fix a bug or $70?