How important is it that your software runs correctly and to spec? For most software it is of the utmost importance. One of the Joel Test 12 is “Do you fix bugs before writing new code?”. Smart development, testing, and QA help prevent bugs in software.
Fixing Code Before Production and After
Fixing code before it goes to production will save you time. I have had bugs that would have taken 30 seconds to fix before going to production that I spent more than a week on fixing after it went to production because it messed up data in another system.
Ways to Prevent Bugs
One of the big things in the programming industry in recent years has been unit testing(and integration testing, TDD, BDD, etc.). Testing is good! It helps find bugs before they are a problem and helps developers make changes in important parts of the code base and have more confidence that they aren’t causing problems in other parts.
If I had a dollar for every time I was asked if I’m writing unit tests why QA is needed, I would definitely have a few dollars. Very simply, QA finds bugs that unit testing does not. Unit and integration testing catch many things, but even though I keep making better software, users will always find a better way to break software.