I don't think I'd be speaking out of school to mention that a) StackExchange and Fog Creek are different companies with their own products, processes, and engin

I don't think I'd be speaking out of school to mention that a) StackExchange and Fog Creek are different companies with their own products, processes, and engineering cultures and b) engineering best practice is a moving target especially since the way we deliver software has changed so much since the days of "gold master which costs $X million and 12 months if we screw up anything on it." If all of your software is web apps delivered over the open Internet, and you have traffic like egads, then you can use a different set of engineering practices to ensure that the proportion of customers inconvenienced by bugs is essentially the same as before without needing a dedicated testing phase/team/etc. There are projects in Fog Creek which are organized around that philosophy, too. I think the Trello guys have written about it fairly extensively. The first thing Google came up with was http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2012/01/06.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2012/01/06.html -- search for "bugs."