Most evidence I've seen supports it. This is especially true when people start integrating stuff with or building on top of a deliverable. Even more if that stu

Most evidence I've seen supports it. This is especially true when people start integrating stuff with or building on top of a deliverable. Even more if that stuff was designed with the deliverables good and bad behavior in mind. It becomes a legacy system that sticks around. Knocking out its problems ahead of time can have considerable savings. Plus, a benefit not often mentioned is that knocking problems out at design time is easier since everything is fresh in developers' minds. They just wrote it. Now, it might not apply in an environment where everything is designed to be pluggable and easy to change without breaks. Maybe folks should run some new studies on such projects to see if there's any major benefits for up-front investments in quality. Enough to pay off that up-front investment like in the other projects.