This article, as is typical around here, addresses a very small part of the industry. Here's a view from a different part; the part where a project has a lifecycle of a decade or so.

I used to work for a software consultancy that had been acquired by a US defence company (second tier). Over the previous 15 years, the software consultancy had elevated their QA to the point that bugs in the delivered product were literally unknown. Nobody ever saw any in the delivered product, over a decade. Every requirement could be traced to the design that would meet it, to the code that implemented it, to the test that verified it. The test documentation was beautiful, and anyone could (and did) execute a complete set of tests, writing their own personal signature on every confirmation of test success. The signed test specs were scanned before being sealed in an envelope against the customer ever choosing to inspect. QA had (and did) veto over requirements, design, and tests.

We were working with two other major, globally known defence names, and the customer had learned through experience that when something went wrong, come to us last. Sometimes, the customer came to us to ask us to work out which of the other companies involved had screwed up (because sometimes, the other companies were themselves unable to work it out). Once, they sued one of the other names for incompetency and gave us their work because we knew how to fix it better than they did, because our interface tests highlighted everything that their software didn't do in accordance with the spec.

We could replay any test, at any version, at any time, and compare the results now with the signed results then from the sealed envelope. The time savings we had because we got things right the first time, by doing it properly, was immense.

Where this is going is that this was priceless. We had the customer's absolute trust, based on experience. Nobody ever found a bug in our delivered software (I'm not saying there weren't any; I'm saying that our QA was thorough enough that the customer was never going to do anything with it that we hadn't tested already). Code coverage, all warnings on, static analysis, valgrind, cross-platform compilation and testing, we did everything. Customers outright told us that we were worth paying extra because of the peace of mind and the reduced risk, so they paid us more and we spent less doing it.

QA is time and money. The better your QA, the more time you will have and the more money you will make.