The Impact of neglected Quality Assurance on Productivity

The productivity of a software development project can be raised by neglecting quality assurance and starting production with an inadequately tested application. One reason for this can be time pressure. An apparent positive effect: The new-development productivity is higher than in projects with more test efforts. 
 
But: Beyond the project duration the effects are:

• Higher defect rate compared with other systems
• Lower productivity when developing future releases or increments, due to the high effort for error analyses and corrections

In most cases these effects are not of lasting nature because the defect rate can be reduced to a "normal" level by high efforts required after production start. However this approach is short-sighted because the effort for tests, error analyses and corrections is simply being shifted from the new-development project to those who are responsible for the subsequent further development. And test effort is being shifted to the first users of a new system. 

The diagram below shows a sample course of defect density and productivity after production start (Rel. 1.0) which is typical in such cases. Contrary to the Impact of Technical Debt on Productivity these projects are mostly able to recover after a longer period, i.e. the defect density decreases due to the meanwhile found and fixed errors and the productivity increases due to the reduced efforts for error correction.

Course of Defect Density and Productivity in a case of neglected qa (example)

An indicator for neglected quality assurance is a low test coverage.

My post Measures for optimizing Productivity shows better measures for increasing the productivity.