A systematic literature review of software quality cost research

Abstract: Software quality costs have not received as much attention from the research community as other economic aspects of software development. Over the last three decades, a number of articles on this topic have appeared in a range of journals, but comprehensive overviews of this body of research are not available. For the detailed review of software quality cost research presented in this article, we collect 87 articles published between 1980 and 2009 in 60 leading computing journals. We study the distribution of these articles across research disciplines and journals as well as over time. Moreover, we identify the predominant researchers in the software quality cost domain and the related research clusters. We also classify the articles according to three properties, namely, research topic, research scope, and research approach. This categorization enables us to identify aspects emphasized by previous research on software quality costs and to point out promising future research directions. Our review shows that prevention costs have gained the least attention, in spite of their big cost impact. It also reveals that only one article has targeted multiple companies. Further, we observe that many articles do not empirically validate their findings. This is especially true for those articles dealing with an entire firm.