The cost associated with not testing software ...

... in this case can cost one an election. Or at least it appears to have been somewhat of a case for Mittens.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orca
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/11/inside-team-romneys-whale-of-an-it-meltdown/

Oh and for those idiots who still believe that automation can replace a person when it comes to testing, there's this gem -

"But Orca turned out to be toothless, thanks to a series of deployment blunders and network and system failures. While the system was stress-tested using automated testing tools, users received little or no advance training on the system. Crucially, there was no dry run to test how Orca would perform over the public Internet."

Gee you'd think before going live with the system in action, you'd want to you know ... see what it's actually doing before going live. Thus -

"Throughout the day, the Orca Web page was repeatedly inaccessible. It remains unclear whether the issue was server load or a lack of available bandwidth, but the result was the same: Orca had not been tested under real-world conditions and repeatedly failed when it was needed the most."

This is what you get -

Robert X. Cringely, writing in InfoWorld, concluded that "Everything in the Orca rollout went great, except for a failure to do any quality assurance, proof its documentation, or beta test in the seven months from conception to implementation. Whoever was behind Orca apparently also failed to hire a competent Web designer, anticipate server loads, beef up its bandwidth, or notify its ISP to expect a bump in traffic."[13] Sean Gallagher of Ars Technica commented that the key failure was the dependency on automated testing rigs, which "can't show what the system's performance will look like to the end user. And whatever testing environment Romney's campaign team and IT consultants used, it wasn't one that mimicked the conditions of Election Day. As a result, Orca's launch on Election Day was essentially a beta test of the software – not something most IT organizations would do in such a high-stakes environment.“[2]

Priceless comment from Kani-

"You're telling me that software without QA turns out to be garbage? Unheard of!"