• Flawed software cost the U.S. economy $60 billion in 2002.
• In recent software glitch resulted in the loss of thousands of dollars for US Airways when some tickets were mistakenly priced at $1.86.
• In the latest U.S. presidential election, reports of incorrect tallies surfaced in several districts that were using new computerized voting machines.
• A software bug apparently caused the largest power outage in North America, the Northeast blackout of August 2003, which threw millions of people into darkness.

Some reasons behind this are:

• Poor understanding of the requirements
• Absence of communication between all the teams working on the application development
• Difficulty in keeping track of changes and versions

To improve this situation one can follow application life-cycle management (ALM). ALM is about processes. At every stage of the application development, processes should be established. From the planning stage quality needs to be considered. At each stage proper communication between business analysts, development and QA team is required. So that developers as well as QA people understand the requirement very well. And all the doubts related with specifications, business requirements can be solved at planning stage.

Every organization is facing problems due to "buggy software" in the form of lost or corrupted data, missed sales opportunities and high software maintenance costs.

What are your thoughts on ALM? Can ALM help make software bug free?

Reference:
>> Buggy Software: Up From a Low-Quality Quagmire