> I would say universally that bugs found prior to shipping are lower cost (not just cost to fix) than those found after. There's a survivorship bias in this c

> I would say universally that bugs found prior to shipping are lower cost (not just cost to fix) than those found after. There's a survivorship bias in this comparison, though. All software contains bugs - some are found in the architectural, coding, testing, review, and end-user stages. Bugs found after shipping are more likely to be significant to an actual user, because it's likely they were noticed in the course of someone using the software a particular way. However, it's entirely possible that there are bugs that never need to be fixed. Perhaps these bugs involve scenarios that never crop up, or are part of a product direction that gets abandoned completely. (Example: Quibi probably didn't need to handle credit card expiry gracefully, that would have been wasted effort). Those bugs that made it into prod and got prioritized for a fix, and were memorable are likely to be higher effort just by the nature of those filters.