[bradleyland]

"However, business applications are a different story."

You've sure got that right. Our application conducts real-time purchasing events (reverse auctions) where bidders are ranked based on a couple of different configurable algorithms. An error in calculation means incorrect ranking, which means the entire outcome is invalidated. Considering that it can take weeks to put together a purchasing event of this type means that there is a lot riding on that single series of calculations.

Simply releasing and finding bugs in production would be financial suicide. QA isn't even a question in our business. Everything is tested thoroughly when it goes out the door.

[bmj]

I write software for clinical trial data collection, so I'm in the same boat. Not only is every product tested, but QA must thoroughly document their tests. At the end of the day, yeah, it slow the process down, but the software is significantly more robust when it heads into field.

Having worked at many companies that didn't believe in QA at all, I think having a team of testers is beneficial not only for software quality, but also filtering potential bug reports from the field. When a client reports a potential, QA does the initial leg work in duplicating the issue, then passes it off to engineering.