We have done some research for information on the cost of defects so we can use decreasing defects in products as our business case. Initially these would all be soft dollars since we do not have an establish baseline to work against. Our source for this is Robert Grady, Practical Software Metrics for Project Management and Process Improvement.
In his book, he stated that his team at HP found the hours to fix defects found in test were as follows
Coding defects that are not found until testing are 2.5 times their cost when they are found during coding.
Design defects are 6.25 times
Specification/Requirement defects are 14.25 times
The text normalized the data (because they didn’t have fix time metrics either) to be that a coding defect found during code/unit test would take 1 hour to fix. With this assumption, the above numbers then become the hours to fix. Again this would be fix time if the defect is found during test.
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