>It seems odd to me when those in charge ignore the problems of disbanding QA. But I assume it's because the management may not be incentivized to promote quality software. Instead the incentives are to crank out features.

>That said, maybe the market for the software doesn't punish the software makers for having buggy software. In such a case, ignoring QA work is a rational decision.

I think there are a lot of things that promote cost cutting in software quality:

  1. Consolidation: There's usually 1 big player that everyone uses. When that's the case there is nowhere else to go.

  2. Lock in: Even if there was somewhere to go, once you've committed your business to a software vendor, it's really hard (time + expense) to switch.

  3. Executives get bonuses based on income: The easiest way to juice the numbers is to cut employees and departments. The results of cutting QA won't get noticed by the market for a few years.

  4. Over reliance on automated unit testing by management: I think unit testing is great, but it's really hard to utilize it on user XP. It was never meant to be a replacement to manual QA testing, but an augmentation. Of course refer to #3.

  5. Reduction in autonomous middle management: Executives say cut this and cut that, middle management who actually know the process have little to no say, or won't say because they don't want to lose their jobs.