Bugs are infinitely more expensive to fix in production. The best example is 737 Max - how do you quantify monetarily the lost lives? The reputation damage? The

Bugs are infinitely more expensive to fix in production. The best example is 737 Max - how do you quantify monetarily the lost lives? The reputation damage? The lawsuits? The future contracts that were lost? But you don't have to go to that extreme. For instance, I just heard today of a lost contract from a coworker: the client was fed up with a call management system that was dropping calls like crazy and nobody was able to fix since you could not even replicate the system (the last time they tried it, the test system pulled stuff from the production db and it basically brought everything down). How do you calculate the cost of this? Cost of debugging, lost revenue, lost referrals, brand damage, and the toll on developers and everyone doing crisis management.. I'd say 100x is a very optimistic estimate. It can very well cost much more than that. Trivial bugs are trivial bugs, and not all the bugs are the same. A misaligned table is nothing compared to a monolith/blob of 50Mb (either a binary compiled from C or minified JavaScript) that crashes with "segfault" or "undefined" but runs fine in debug mode. Bottom line: bugs in production, especially on complex systems, can be very hard to identify and fix - and sometimes can cost you your business.