At my current position, QA has become a bottleneck. We have had the unfortunate occurence of features being held out of the current build so that QA could finish testing. This means features that are done being developed may not get tested for 2-3 weeks after the developer has already moved on. With dev moving faster thean QA, this time gap is only going to get bigger.

I keep flipping through my copy of Code Compelte, looking for a "Hard Data" snippet that shows the cost of fixing defects grows exponentially the longer it exists. Can someone point me to some studies that back up this concept? I am trying to convince the powers that be that the QA bottleneck is a lot more costly than they think.