Conformance quality and failure costs in the software Industry: An empirical analysis of open source software

The quality cost concept is well known in production economics. Recently, it has received a lot of attention in the field of software engineering. However, empirical studies of the association between failure costs and conformance quality have only been conducted for closed source software projects, but not for open source projects. This paper addresses this research gap. On the one hand, our analysis revalidates findings from production economics. On the other hand, it extends the limited empirical knowledge in the software quality cost research domain.