The cost of fixing a bug

Once we have made it clear that we have a communication problem, bugs are expected to arise during our process. Either a misalignment with the requirements or even the requirements being wrong usually leads to a defect that could prevent us from deploying the application to production and delay everything.

In waterfall, fixing a bug is increasingly possible in every step we take. For example, fixing a bug in the requirements phase is very straightforward: just update the diagrams/documentation, and we are done. If the same bug is captured by a QA engineer in the verification phase, we need to:

• Update the documents/diagrams
• Create a new version of the application
• Deploy the new version to the QA environment

If the bug is caught in production, you can imagine how many steps are involved in fixing it, not to mention the stress, particularly if the bug compromises the revenue of your company.