Who finds the defects: SQA or the customer

This, to me, is the ultimate measure of effectiveness of an SQA group. To convert this into their efficiency, you'd have to take into account how much effort went into finding the bugs internally.

I suspect this varies widely from company to company. I do remember reading somewhere many years ago that someone had estimated that only 1/2 of the bugs that ever existed in a product were found before it shipped. I think that was focused on commercial, shrink-wrap products.

The funny thing is, there is not a good correlation between these numbers and the customers' perception of the quality of the products produced by certain companies. I remember one company I worked for that had almost as many bugs coming in from the field as from SQA, yet the customers seemed to feel that the product was fairly solid. Another place I worked had almost no bugs reported from the field, yet customers were always complaining that the products stank. Perhaps this is a function of the support group and their ability to characterize every customer call in the defect tracking system (the first company had a really good support system).


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