In a new book titled The Economics of Software Quality, authors Capers Jones and Olivier Bonsignour say that quality business applications must work on multiple platforms, across multiple countries, and they must interoperate with legacy applications and similar software solutions. They note that application development pros spend time looking for or fixing software bugs 1 million times per day. And they recommend seven best practices for choosing quality business software:

1. Acquire tools to extract algorithms and business rules from legacy application source code.
2. Identify and display common generic features used by many similar applications.
3. Define test cases as natural byproducts of requirements analysis.
4. Command the dynamic aspects of software apps.
5. Manage the growth of requirements over time.
6. Ensure apps operate on a variety of platforms, such as Windows, Linux, Leopard, Android.
7. Make software usable in multiple countries.

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