About three in every four (74%) Singapore organisations believe poor software quality costs them between $500,000 (SG$660,000) and $5 million (SG$6.6 million) or even more yearly.
Organisations in the manufacturing industry suffer the highest costs, with more than a third (39%) paying upwards of $1 million per year due to poor software quality.
This is according to a maiden report from Tricentis, conducted via a global survey fielded in March of 2025. There were 2,750 respondents from 10 countries, including 500 from Singapore.
Others were based in the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, Japan, Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, Colombia and Peru.
Findings show that 61% of Singapore organisations were significantly at risk of software outage within the next year. Also, 7% of respondents were already suffering from a major software outage this year.
In addition, 46% 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. They cited the need to expedite release cycles (47%) and accidental slips of untested code (45%) as driving factors.
Further, 80% of organisations surveyed report excitement about the possibility of AI agents to assume their monotonous tasks in the development and delivery cycle. This would free up time for more strategic and rewarding work.
Moreover, 87% CIOs, CTOs, and software delivery teams are confident in AI’s ability to autonomously make software release decisions. Results also show that 94% of organisations plan 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.
Nearly half of respondents (48%) identified ethical AI considerations and risk management as the most important skill for maintaining software quality. This was 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 of 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,” said Thompson.