I see in a ComputerWorld UK article that consultancy firm IDC have released new research on the state of in-house software development.

IDC interviewed 139 corporate development firms for their ‘Improving Software Quality to Drive Business Agility’ survey with the main finding being that the majority of respondents noted that their in-house software has become more complex and harder to debug in the past couple of years. This software erosion means that code reviews are failing to find critical quality problems in almost half of the surveyed organisations.

The researcher’s advice to businesses: “… understand the long-term costs of poor quality software development and invest properly in the development cycle”. Unfortunately, the author notes that most businesses are very optimistic when it comes to estimating current and ongoing costs for fixing software quality problems.

Let me know if you have any counter-examples…