We all know quality matters. And yet, time after time, organizations deploy software they know isn’t fully tested—sacrificing quality in the name of speed. Sometimes that gamble pays off, but more often, it backfires. According to the 2025 Quality Transformation Report from Tricentis, nearly half of public sector agencies are losing between $1 million and $5 million annually due to software issues, while another 3.2% are losing even more. Globally, 66% of organizations say they’re at risk of a software outage within the next year—proof that the cost of poor software quality is real, rising, and no longer something teams can afford to ignore.
See also: Ensuring Good Data Quality with Automated Data Pipelines
The problem isn’t awareness. It’s behavior. Why do so many organizations, even ones that know better, continue to put speed ahead of quality? To truly understand what’s shaping up to be an impossible choice, we need to understand the pace of operations in our current world.
How Deployment Got So Fast And So Risky
Software deployment today occurs at a speed that would have seemed impossible a generation ago. That’s not accidental. A series of technical, cultural, and strategic shifts have collapsed the release cycle and created enormous pressure to ship quickly.
Agile and DevOps Changed the Game
Agile development replaced rigid, months-long planning with iterative sprints. DevOps broke down barriers between developers and operations. Together, they made frequent, incremental deployment the new normal. Speed became not just a benefit, but a business expectation.
Cloud Infrastructure Eliminated the Wait
Cloud computing lets teams deploy in minutes, not months—no more waiting on hardware or manual provisioning. Infrastructure is now on-demand. With infrastructure abstracted away, release cycles collapsed from months to hours.
CI/CD Pipelines Automated Everything
Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment tools turned testing and shipping into background processes. Once the code passes the automated checks, it can go live automatically. Releasing became part of the workflow, not a separate milestone. This isn’t always a bad thing, but without pauses, it can foster a culture of inattention.
Product-Led Growth Encouraged Constant Tweaking
If users don’t like it, you can roll it back, or so the thinking goes. SaaS companies push updates based on real-time analytics. A/B tests, feature flags, and rapid iteration have made daily or hourly deployments common.
Executive Culture Shifted Toward “Now”
Fast releases are seen as a sign of innovation. Internal stakeholders want dashboards that move. The public wants visible improvement. Everyone wants progress, and they want it fast. All of this makes one thing clear: Speed is no longer optional, but quality often still feels like it is.
Let’s examine why this continues to happen and what it’s costing organizations that fail to balance the equation.
1. Progress Is Political and Visible
In both public and private sectors, delivery speed is often treated as a sign of momentum. Leaders are rewarded for shipping fast, even if the cost of rework, downtime, and user frustration is paid later. In public agencies, where timelines are tied to budget cycles and public perception, the pressure is even higher.
Essentially, there is more incentive to launch something than to launch it well. When the metric for success is how quickly something goes live, quality gets pushed to the sidelines.
2. Testing Still Slows Things Down
Manual testing doesn’t scale. In many organizations, automated testing hasn’t been developed to keep pace with modern development. Developers outpace test engineers. Gaps in test coverage create bottlenecks in pipelines. According to the Tricentis report, more than 70% of respondents reported delaying releases due to low confidence in testing.
If testing isn’t built to move at the speed of development, it may get bypassed. Until testing is integrated, automated, and scalable, it will continue to be the step teams skip under pressure.
3. Quality Is Everyone’s Job, So No One Owns It
One of the most underreported blockers to software quality is organizational misalignment. Developers are incentivized to build. QA teams are under-resourced. Communication breakdowns are common. According to Tricentis, 33.2% of public sector respondents cited a lack of personnel, and 32% pointed to poor communication between developers and testers as key issues.
This is similar to mismanaging benchmarks or failing to create measurable KPIs. You can’t prioritize quality if no one owns it. Without clear accountability and cross-functional collaboration, testing falls through the cracks.
4. GenAI Is Moving the Goalposts
The rise of generative AI is accelerating development cycles even further. Forty-five percent of companies say speed is the top priority from GenAI. Only 13% prioritize quality. At the same time, 90% say they trust AI to make critical decisions about software releases.
GenAI accelerates deployment, but it doesn’t guarantee resilience. This overconfidence can lead teams to overlook gaps in test coverage, validation, or long-term maintainability. Speed without scrutiny will continue to create risks.
5. Teams Assume They Can Fix It Later
There’s a common belief that software is never finished, that bugs can be patched post-release, and fixes are part of the process. In reality, that only works in controlled environments. For public agencies or customer-facing systems, the costs of deploying broken code can be enormous.
Shipping broken code and promising a fix is a luxury not everyone can afford. The longer bad code remains in production, the more expensive it becomes to correct, not just in dollars but also in terms of user trust and operational stability.
Quality Has to Catch Up to Speed
Organizations aren’t wrong to value speed. In fact, they’ve rebuilt their entire delivery ecosystems around it, from Agile workflows to cloud-native infrastructure to GenAI-enhanced pipelines. But somewhere along the way, quality got left behind.
As the Tricentis report makes clear, the cost of poor software quality is no longer hypothetical. It’s measured in millions of dollars lost each year, not just on fixing problems but on missed opportunities, eroded trust, and stalled transformation efforts. When 66% of global organizations admit they’re at risk of a software outage in the next year, it’s not a warning. It’s a reality check.
That doesn’t mean slowing down. It means investing in the tools and practices that enable you to move fast and smart—automated testing, scalable QA processes, and intelligent frameworks that catch issues early rather than cleaning up chaos later.
AI has a powerful role to play to mitigate the cost of poor software quality, but not as a crutch. It should amplify human oversight, not replace it. The future of software isn’t about choosing between speed and quality; it’s about achieving both. It’s about building systems where the two advance together. Testing isn’t the drag on progress. It’s the engine that makes real progress possible.
Read the full report here.
Elizabeth Wallace is a Nashville-based freelance writer with a soft spot for data science and AI and a background in linguistics. She spent 13 years teaching language in higher ed and now helps startups and other organizations explain – clearly – what it is they do.
