Poor-quality software cost the US economy $2.1 trillion last year

Operational software failure due to unpatched bugs was the leading contributor to the wasted $2.1 trillion

Poor quality software cost the USA about $2.1 trillion last year, according to a new report by the Consortium for Information & Software Quality (CISQ).

The Synopsys-sponsored report, entitled 'Cost of Poor Software Quality [CPSQ] in the US: A 2020 Report' used publicly available information to estimate the impact of low-quality software on the US economy.

The report defines this software as products that fail to provide value to users, don't meet profit goals and cause problems for users or organisations.

The researchers looked at inferior software quality resulting from fragile legacy systems, unsuccessful development projects, software failures, technical debt and cyber attacks launched using software security vulnerabilities.

The team found the leading contributor for the total CPSQ was operational software failure due to unpatched bugs - costing $1.6 trillion, up from $1.3 trillion in 2018.

The second-largest contributor for the overall cost was legacy system issues, according to the report. The CPSQ linked with operating and maintaining legacy software was estimated at $520 billion, down from $635 billion in 2018.

CPSQ associated with unsuccessful IT initiatives and software development projects was the third largest growth area, accounting for $260 billion in 2020, up 46 per cent from $177.5 billion in 2018. The researchers found that, while there are multiple factors causing project failures, lack of attention to quality was one consistent theme.

According to the report, many US IT projects in 2020 were executed in a hurried manner in response to the pressures of the coronavirus pandemic, which contributed to an expansion in software failures.

"There was a lot of software put together very quickly," said Herb Krasner, author of the report, a retired software engineering professor at the University of Texas and advisory board member at CISQ.

"It was reactionary to what the situation was. That means that a lot more software was put into service over these last nine months or so than would have been otherwise," added.

The CISQ report advises software vendors to avoid unsuccessful projects by not creating arbitrary schedules, and also recommend paying attention to defined quality objectives, and measuring against those objectives throughout a project's lifecycle.