I must politely disagree. And this is very much off topic to this N/G.

I have worked on very large projects (including a tracking system for
NASA). When QA is part of the planning process (that is, a group is
responsible for validation, certification and regression testing),
things are done a bit differently.

When automation is used to test the system being built, testing and the
results come back very quickly. Debugging done by the developers is
more efficient than when it is expected of the support people. The cost
of debugged lines of code drops.

One other thing about software development - high level language coding
vs. assembly language ("machine language") coding. The development
costs are quite high for assembly language, particularly when they have
to work right the first time. But when that development can be done in
high-level languages that have been debugged, cost of development drops
when compared to "machine language" development.

So when software development is controlled and driven by the marketing
arm of a company, too often you get buggy code that has not been
correctly documented. [I've worked under those conditions too.]

Regards,
Steve.T
PP ASEL/Instrument