The Quality Cost Curve: The Price of Finding Problems Late

Ask an engineer what a quality issue will cost to remedy, and they’ll usually describe the technical work: reproduce the issue, isolate the cause, write and validate a fix. That’s one cost, to be sure, but it’s a fraction of the cost that will show up on a balance sheet. The factor that matters is when the fix happens, because the same technical correction can trigger wildly different bills depending on which side of one particular line it falls on.