Developers are under great pressure to deliver more complex software with increasingly aggressive schedules and with limited resources. Testers are expected to validate the quality of software even faster and with even fewer resources. In such an environment; solid, repeatable, and practical testing methods and automation are a must.

Failure to design a proper test plan could lead to allocating precious resources to items that have a lower priority, or even worse, not allocating enough towards items that are critical to the success of the project.

If you are using the waterfall approach and you leave the testing until the end of the project, you may find that a significant problem could cause you to have to redesign the entire project.

Customers who purchase your products might be unhappy with your product.

If customers try a competing product and like it, they may never try your product again.

Customers may contact your technical support which will increase your costs for providing these services.

Increased returns could lead the vendors that sell your product to become unhappy. This could lead to inferior product placement or dropping your product altogether.

Depending on your product, you could get sued if it does not perform as it should.

If you have a website and it cannot handle the volume of traffic that you are getting, you may be losing sales because people can not access your site, or they don't want to wait for your slow response times.

Without a properly designed test plan you may even neglect to test a portion of your software.

The cost of finding and fixing bugs increases as the software development lifecycle goes on.

Customers may perceive that other products from your company may also contain bugs, and therefore decide to purchase a competing product.

Customers might call or write to complain which will increase the burden on your staff.

Customers may return your product, which will increase your costs for processing returns.

You may have to develop a patch for your product. This pulls programming resources away from other revenue generating activities.

If you are a developer, you may not get considered for the next project.

These are just a few of the risks associated with not testing your product properly. Most of these risks are difficult to quantify. However, one thing is certain: Improper testing will cost you money!