System defects are incredibly painful for companies, creating incredible expense, revenue risks, and market perception risks. A significant number of projects fail to meet objectives and suffer significant schedule and budget slippage because of defects and poor quality. Clearly, effective software quality assurance should be a priority. Why then do companies continue to miss release schedules, overrun budgets, and release defect ridden software that requires countless rework loops to get even close to acceptable performance? In most cases, companies simply don't have an efficient and efficient software performance assurance process and find the time and cost associated with putting such a process and infrastructure in place daunting.