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Project Management & Agile · Foundational

Cost of Quality (COQ)

All costs of preventing nonconformance, appraising conformance, and failing to meet requirements over the product life.

Definition

Cost of conformance: prevention (training, design reviews) and appraisal (testing, inspection). Cost of nonconformance: internal failure (rework, scrap) and external failure (warranty, liability, lost reputation).

Example

Spending on code reviews (prevention) reduces costly production bugs (external failure).

Exam tip

Prevention is cheapest; external failure is most expensive.

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