After a nasty incident, nobody asks, “Why didn’t we invest in training, pairing, or design reviews?” but rather, “Why didn’t QA catch it?” Suddenly, the company is spending large amounts of money on mitigation, hotfixes, support**,** and reputation repair: the most expensive kind of quality work.

Whenever the speaker tried to justify investments in proper quality assurance (QA) measures, management rejected them, and it became obvious why: preventive measures do not produce a visible result; they only reduce the chance of a bad result. It seems impossible to measure proactive QA return on investment (ROI), so it can feel as if professional ethics are at odds with what management wants.

In this talk, the speaker will show how cost of quality helps reframe the conversation. Instead of asking QA to prove the ROI of preventive measures, the discussion compares three costs for the same risk: the cost of continuing to absorb failures, the cost of catching them earlier through testing, and the cost of preventing them. When that trade-off is explicit, decisions stop being about faith, and QA ethics finally align with economics.