Cost of Quality Analysis for an Embedded Communication Project

This report examines the use of Cost of Quality (CoQ) analysis in hardware–software integrated embedded systems, focusing on projects where detailed quantitative effort data is not available. The study is based on a single industrial case involving an FPGA-based real-time embedded communication system. A systematic literature review is conducted to understand existing CoQ approaches and to identify their limitations in embedded system contexts. Based on these findings, CoQ activities in the case project are analyzed by considering software, hardware, and system or management activities separately. Quality related effort is estimated using a combination of project artifacts, expert judgement, and an exploratory Large Language Model (LLM)-based estimation approach. The results show that useful CoQ-related insights can be obtained without precise time-tracking data. In the studied project, software effort is mainly influenced by integration related rework, hardware effort is concentrated on early preventive activities, and system-level effort is largely driven by coordination and integration tasks. Overall, the study shows that CoQ analysis can be used as a qualitative, decision support tool to understand quality-- related effort in embedded system development under realistic industrial constraints.