I basically agree, but in many cases I know it's not so much a question of amount of effort as it is spending effort doing things that either sound "tried and true" or happen to be quantifiable, at the expense of the things that would actually make quality better.
It's another type of taking the easy way out in that a potentially more effective context-driven strategy takes more effort to justify and maintain faith up the chain. But not adopting a strategy specific to your context can easily result in spending a lot of effort to get only marginally better results than unit testing, dogfooding, and nothing else.
Yes, that's the critical paradox: the things that are more measurable or easier to measure are the things that are done, despite them having less impact on quality than things that are difficult to measure or unmeasurable.
Deming said it: "The most important things cannot be measured." How right he was.
I like the old joke about the guy searching around the lamppost at the corner. Another guy asks him what's up, and he says "I dropped my keys." When asked where on the corner he might have dropped them, he replies "Oh, I actually dropped them down the street a couple of blocks, but it's way too dark over there."
I find that joke to frequently be all too relevant to current quality practices.
It's another type of taking the easy way out in that a potentially more effective context-driven strategy takes more effort to justify and maintain faith up the chain. But not adopting a strategy specific to your context can easily result in spending a lot of effort to get only marginally better results than unit testing, dogfooding, and nothing else.