Substantial losses due to poor software quality: Tricentis

Source: Tricentis blog post. Quality gaps can end up costing businesses millions.

Tricentis, a global provider of continuous testing and quality engineering, has shared the challenges in delivering quality software as well as dissonance among today’s technology leaders and professionals around how to prioritise speed, quality, and cost in today’s AI-driven economy in new research*.

In Singapore, the inaugural global 2025 Quality Transformation Report found:

Quality gaps are costing organisations more than half a million dollars every year

- Seventy-four percent of Singapore organisations believe poor software quality costs them between US$500,000 and US$5 M or more annually.

- Organisations in the manufacturing industry suffer the highest costs, with more than a third (39%) paying upwards of US$1 M per year due to poor software quality.

Software outage threats intensify

- At least six in 10 (61%) Singapore organisations are significantly at risk of software outage within the next year, with 7% of respondents already suffering from a major software outage this year.

Software quality and speed remain priorities, but delivery pressures lead to untested software

- Forty-six percent of Singapore organisations are focused on improving overall software quality and increasing speed of software development and deployment. This ranks significantly higher than the global average, where only 13% emphasised quality.

- Despite this focus on quality, nearly half (47%) of Singapore organisations ship code changes without fully testing them, citing the need to expedite release cycles (47%) and accidental slips of untested code (45%) as driving factors.

Agentic AI looks set to help plug productivity, quality, and performance gaps

- The majority of organisations surveyed (80%) report excitement about the possibility of AI agents to assume their monotonous tasks in the development and delivery cycle, freeing up time for more strategic and rewarding work.

AI is gaining executive trust to drive critical high-stakes decisions

- Eight-seven percent of CIOs, CTOs, and software delivery teams are confident in AI’s ability to autonomously make software release decisions, with 94% of organisations planning to increase AI use in software testing in future.

- Areas where technology leaders and software development professionals expect to see the most impact include autocorrecting during test execution (28%), analysing execution results (27%), and improving software speed (26%) and quality (25%) overall.

Organisations recognise critical AI skills required for successful software quality

- Nearly half of respondents (48%) identified ethical AI considerations and risk management as the most important skill for maintaining software quality, followed by contextual understanding (44%), and mastery of AI prompting techniques (44%).

“Recent software outages due to unchecked or untested code changes showcase just how critical high-quality software is to the wider organisational ecosystem, and having the right balance of quality and speed to serve developing technological needs is paramount,” said Kevin Thompson, CEO, Tricentis.

“As AI continues to evolve, we believe tech leaders and practitioners need to define what quality means for their organisation to strike the right balance between quality, speed, and cost, while implementing comprehensive testing strategies to deliver better business outcomes.”

“The financial impact of poor software quality is a clear threat to business resilience and growth,” said Damien Wong, Senior VP for Asia Pacific at Tricentis.

“As Singapore organisations accelerate software development cycles, maintaining rigorous quality standards through AI testing, smarter testing strategies and increased investment in AI skills to manage emerging risks, maintain software resilience and sustain long-term innovation.”

The report has noted that the paradigm shift taking place in software development, accelerated by AI, presents both obstacles and opportunities for leaders and practitioners to capitalise on innovative solutions that help address the ongoing discussion related to speed and quality.

Tricentis provides a full suite of AI-powered quality engineering solutions that address critical aspects of the software delivery process for enterprise organisations.

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The Tricentis 2025 Quality Transformation Report is available to download at https://www.tricentis.com/resources/quality-transformation-report.

Tricentis conducted the Quality Transformation Report via a global survey fielded in March of 2025, with 2,750 respondents from 10 countries, including 500 from Singapore, across five industry verticals. Respondents included CIOs, CTOs, GMs, VPs of engineering, VPs of applications, VPs of IT, VPs of quality assurance, IT practitioners, DevOps leaders, quality assurance leaders, and software developers. This report examined top trends and developments in software development, software testing, software quality, DevOps, and AI.