Developers Spend 10-25% of Their Time Fixing Bugs in the Finished Product

According to research, 43% of enterprise developers spend 10 to 25% of their time debugging and fixing bugs in ready applications.

ClusterHQ analysts came to this conclusion based on a survey of developers: a quarter of respondents reported that they have to fix bugs in production several times a week.

The authors of the study believe that such a waste of time is too big: developers need to focus more on implementing new features for users than on constantly fixing bugs.

Developers were asked to name the most common problems they have to solve. 33% said they were unable to recreate their real-world environment during testing. 27% recalled the interdependence of the product and external systems, which makes integral testing difficult. 26% pointed to the problem of modeling realistic data needed to test the application.

The researchers also asked the respondents to rate the priority of bugs according to severity. 62% of respondents answered that the cost of an error missed at the production stage is the highest. 18% consider the development stage the most “expensive”, 7% noted the QA stage,
and 6% – testing.

Mark Davis, CEO of ClusterHQ, stated that their research showed that testing based on a limited subset of specially generated data is no longer relevant for teams focused on maximizing the time to develop useful features the users need. Software developers need to understand that to provide customers with innovation and improvements, you need to manage the software lifecycle effectively along with the diverse layers of the infrastructure. This process starts by identifying and fixing bugs as early as possible so teams can focus on adding what the end user needs.

The authors of the study believe that changes in software development and testing processes will positively affect the company’s ability to scale. Another thing is that not all companies are willing and able to implement these changes.

88% of respondents would like to be able to test applications on real data during development. However, so far, several obstacles remain on the way. The main one is to ensure the relevance of the test data. This is the opinion of 23% of the respondents. 19.5% cite the difficulty of updating test suites at the same time wherever they are stored as the main problem. The same number of respondents mention the difficulty of supporting multiple versions of data. 18% note the problem of managing access to information, 14% consider copying data from a working system too time-consuming process. 6% are confident that the cost of storing huge amounts of redundant information will be unreasonably high.

A total of 386 IT professionals were interviewed.