In many cases, the companies which need a more formal approach to testing are developing safety-critical
systems, such as air traffic control, missile guidance, or medical delivery systems, where a failure can harm people.
But the criticality of a system is not necessarily immediately obvious. It's likely that the impact of a defect could
cause the business using the software considerable expense in lost revenue and, possibly, legal expenses. In this
information age, with increasing demands on providing electronically delivered services over the Internet,
many information systems are now considered mission-critical. That is, companies cannot fulfill their functions
and they experience massive losses when failures occur.
A continuous approach to quality, initiated early in the software lifecycle, can significantly lower the cost of
completing and maintaining your software. This greatly reduces the risk associated with deploying poor-quality
software.
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