We do not have any good research backing "bugs found later in the process cost more to fix".
If anything, the few empirical and solid dataset we have show no correlation, to at best really light one.
This principle may sound solid in theory, but the evidence is not here to support it and if anything seems to point to its invalidity.
See in particular https://shape-of-code.com/2021/06/27/increase-in-defect-fixi...
But I just want to object to "we don't have any good evidence". This is the sort of thing that it's really hard to get scientific evidence for, but that doesn't mean we can't learn about it.
But by reducing their costs through looser coupling and incremental work. That is where all kind of agile and DevOps research showed.
We do? I seriously doubt that. New good and bad architectures are popping up all the time. And there are plenty of architectures that people totally disagree about, e.g. microservices.
> But by reducing their costs through looser coupling
In my experience loose coupling is something to be generally avoided where possible. It leads to spaghetti systems and unknown data flows. Pretty much the dynamic typing of architecture design.
I'm not exactly sure what point you're trying to make though so I may have misunderstood...
I mean I fixed a trivial-to-fix bug the other day that probably Rust would have caught. Between the time it took for them to report it, support doing their thing and a new build was out it took an hour. An hour that our customer couldn't do what they needed to do for their work.
So I'd say it's almost trivially true that a bug caught before release costs less to fix.
The plural of anecdote is not data, but this is not a science website either. You don’t need a study to establish engineering common sense.