This question is hammering in my head for a long time, and I believe companies should consider giving it an answer from their own reality and perspective.

We have two kinds of Quality Costs - Poor Quality costs, and Good Quality costs.

Poor quality costs - are those costs we pay for re-design, re-code (fix defects), delays because of bad quality, etc.

Good quality costs - are those costs involving reviews (of any kind in the development life cycle), unit tests, component tests, integration tests, system integration tests, etc.

We have more costs we might not be paying attention to like: production defect analysis process changes, build quality rejections (when sent to test team, or delivered to a tester in an agile group), APIs promised but yet not delivered, process going to slow, inefficiency in development and testing (and any other discipline group involved in the project), missed deadlines, late delivery by different development groups, and more.

These are (many times) not “counted” in the Poor Quality "basket" by many companies, and only a few companies are doing something actively about them.

The key is first measuring things and secondly proactively improving things in our processes, skills, tools and operation.

At QualityWize™ we aim to discover, measure and reduce the Poor Quality costs, while increasing the Good Quality ones, which in most cases, are much much lower than the Poor Quality ones. We use optimization techniques and tools, and evaluate and integrate operations of companies into a more coherent, effective and efficient use of the effort, skills and tools.

Take a look on how we can help you out at http://goo.gl/hgygsH