60% of Singapore Firms Now Ship Untested Code, Tricentis Finds
Source: Frontier Enterprise
Three in five Singapore organisations are releasing software with untested code, up sharply from 47% last year, as leadership pressure to ship faster overrides quality checks. Financial services firms are the worst offenders at 71%, and the financial toll of poor quality is estimated at up to S$6.4 million annually per company.
Singapore's software quality problem is getting worse. A new report from Tricentis shows 60% of local organisations shipped untested code in 2026, up from 47% in 2025. More than a third — 36% — say leadership pressure to accelerate delivery is the direct cause. The findings come from a global survey of 2,501 senior IT decision-makers, with 500 respondents based in Singapore.
Financial services leads the pack at 71%, which is ironic given the sector is also the most regulated. The survey found 64% of Singapore organisations estimate poor software quality costs them between S$641,325 and S$6,410,885 annually through outages, delays, and operational disruption. Those are boardroom-level numbers that should be getting more attention than they are.
Here's the paradox: 89% of Singapore organisations already use three or more AI or automation tools across their software development lifecycle, and 84% trust AI agents to make release readiness decisions without human oversight. Yet quality gaps are widening, not shrinking. Tricentis's SVP for APJ, Damien Wong, put it plainly — traditional QA pipelines weren't built for a world where AI generates code faster than humans can review it. Hidden defects are accumulating and surfacing only after deployment, where they cost significantly more to fix.
Why it matters for Singapore: As Singapore pushes deeper into AI adoption across every sector, the gap between development speed and quality governance is a ticking risk. The companies that solve this — whether through better testing frameworks, AI-powered QA, or stronger leadership accountability — will have a genuine competitive advantage. The ones that don't will pay for it in outages, breaches, and customer trust.