About ReworkCost.com
An independent reference for the cost of rework: the time, money, and morale spent redoing software, manufacturing, and construction work that should have been done correctly the first time. Built around a working calculator, named studies, and the benchmarks that anchor every number on the site.
Why this site exists
NIST Planning Report 02-3 (2002) put a $59.5 billion annual price tag on inadequate software testing in the US economy alone. That headline is visible. The per-team math underneath it is not. A 20-engineer team at $200,000 fully-loaded cost running at the NIST 25% rework midpoint is spending $1,000,000 a year on rework that the standard engineering scorecard never surfaces.
The content layer covering this topic is dominated by vendor blogs pitching the tool that supposedly fixes it. The IBM 1-10-100 rule, DORA elite benchmarks, Capers Jones defect-removal efficiency data, the Stripe Developer Coefficient, and ASQ Cost of Quality framework all live in separate publications, often paywalled, and almost never presented side by side. This site puts them in one place with a calculator that uses the canonical inputs and outputs the discussion-starter number engineering leaders need to set a baseline.
Who runs this site
Oliver Wakefield-Smith
Founder, Digital Signet
Oliver runs Digital Signet, an independent studio building data-led pricing and decision tools on public datasets. Two decades as a solutions architect and tech lead across media, utilities, satellite, and data, now applying autonomous AI development methodology to ship real research-grade software at scale.
Email oliver@digitalsignet.com. Profile on LinkedIn.
About Digital Signet
Digital Signet operates a portfolio of independent cost-reference and calculator sites covering specific corners of engineering and operational economics. ReworkCost.com is the rework-economics anchor; sister sites cover adjacent engineering-cost questions.
CI/CD Calculator
Shift-left investment math
Incident Cost Calculator
Production incident economics
CodeDebtCost
Technical-debt accumulation cost
LatencyCost
Latency-to-revenue elasticity
FinOpsCost
Cloud-cost programme economics
SaaS Metrics Calculator
Engineering-cost context
Editorial principles
Source pattern
Built on public reference material across NIST, DORA, ASQ, IBM Systems Sciences Institute, Capers Jones, BLS, McKinsey, Stripe, GitHub, Construction Industry Institute, and named civil-engineering studies.
No vendor sponsorships
Not a Six Sigma certification practice, not a quality-management software reseller, not a process-improvement consultancy. Independent of every named tool vendor on /tools.
No affiliate parameters
Tool reviews link to canonical vendor pages without affiliate tracking. Where an affiliate option exists it is disclosed inline on the review card.
Monthly verification
Calculator multipliers, benchmark percentages, and named-study figures are re-verified the first business week of every month. The footer date reflects the most recent pass.
Single-source freshness
One LAST_VERIFIED_DATE constant rolls every visible date stamp and schema dateModified field. No drifting hardcoded dates between footer and body.
Conservative calculator math
Default rework percentage is the NIST 25% midpoint, the elite floor is 10% (more conservative than DORA's sub-5%), and the 1-10-100 multiplier defaults to 5x not 100x. Outputs are discussion starters, not budget commitments.
What this site covers
Fifteen content pages, each anchored to named studies. The home calculator is the entry surface; the supporting pages cover formula derivation, measurement recipes, cluster benchmarks, root causes, reduction levers, and cross-industry context.
Methodology in brief
Default calculator inputs come from NIST Planning Report 02-3 (rework 20-40%, midpoint 25%) and DORA 2024 (elite change failure rate under 5%, anchored at a more conservative 10% rework floor). Loaded-cost guidance is BLS-anchored (median software developer wage plus 1.3-1.5x benefits and overhead per BLS 2024). The 1-10-100 cost-of-change multiplier follows Barry Boehm Software Engineering Economics (1981) as later triangulated by the IBM Systems Sciences Institute and Capers Jones research.
Full methodology and sources ›Contact and corrections
For corrections, methodology questions, source additions, or scenarios that do not fit cleanly into the calculator model, email oliver@digitalsignet.com. Corrections typically land within five business days.