Imagine a requirements document for Hacker News - such documents traditionally have a tremendous amount of change control around it, with tons of review for every change. Remember, people like you believe it is 100x easier to catch a bug in requirements and 100x gives you lots of budget to spend to make sure you catch bugs in requirements.
So, there's a bug in the requirements document. Specifically, the 'logout' link has a spelling error. It says 'lugout'. If someone were to catch this bug in the requirements doc, it would trigger a bunch of costly review, as we established earlier.
However, in the implementation phase, once the entire site is up and running, it would take maybe 5 minutes to fix.
Is this an imaginary situation or a real world experience of yours? I don't deny that IT is a wide and varied place, everything is possible I guess.
In my experience in situations where changing a typo in a document was hard, changing the production code was even harder. But happy to hear your story where this wasn't the case.
> Remember, people like you believe it is 100x easier to catch a bug in requirements
What? I never said that. It is easier to fix, if the problem is caught. That says nothing about how easy or hard it is to catch it.
> Trivial example, but there it is.
The original question was "Are Late-Stage Bugs More Expensive?" To which my answer was "Yes, but I can't show you my proof because I work on proprietary projects" (which I understand is an answer which leaves everyone unsatisfied.)
Your counter argument is "But let's imagine it is not!" ... which is what the phrase "begging the question" originally used to refer to. Imagining that the answer to a question is not what my experience tells me is not a convincing argument. But maybe I misunderstood what you wrote. If I did I'm sorry about that.
So, there's a bug in the requirements document. Specifically, the 'logout' link has a spelling error. It says 'lugout'. If someone were to catch this bug in the requirements doc, it would trigger a bunch of costly review, as we established earlier.
However, in the implementation phase, once the entire site is up and running, it would take maybe 5 minutes to fix.
Trivial example, but there it is.