Software quality crisis made worse by developer shortage, report claims Share Copy Shoddy software cost the US an estimated $2.08tr in 2020, according to the Consortium for Information & Software Quality (CISQ). That's down slightly from a revised 2018 total of $2.1tr but still isn't anything to brag about. In its 2020 report, The Cost of Poor Software Quality in the US, the Massachusetts-based standards group co-founded by the non-profit Object Management Group and Carnegie Mellon University's Software Engineering Institute (SEI), identifies three major cost sinkholes. Unsuccessful IT initiatives and software projects are estimated to have cost $260bn in 2020, up from $177.5bn in 2018. Poor quality in legacy systems is said to have eaten up $520bn, down from $635bn in 2018. And operational software failures – bugs – took a toll of $1.56tr last year, significantly more than the $1.275tr flushed away in 2018.