App Developers Spend Too Much Time Debugging Errors in Production Systems (betanews.com)

According to a new study, 43 percent of app developers spend between 10 and 25 percent of their time debugging application errors discovered in production. BetaNews adds: The survey carried out by ClusterHQ found that a quarter of respondents report encountering bugs discovered in production one or more times per week. Respondents were also asked to identify the most common causes of bugs. These were, inability to fully recreate production environments in testing (33 percent), interdependence on external systems that makes integration testing difficult (27 percent) and testing against unrealistic data before moving into production (26 percent). When asked to identify the environment in which bugs are most costly to fix, 62 percent selected production as the most expensive stage of app development to fix errors, followed by development (18 percent), staging (seven percent), QA (seven percent) and testing (six percent).

Comments

Something is missing here

[cerberusss]

App developer here.

Something is missing here; namely we spend more time debugging issues found in production, because they get reported. Almost every app nowadays has a crash logger that reports all crashes. Libraries like Twitter's Crashlytics are awesome like that. You get all crashes reported to you, including a ring buffer of the last 100 log messages. It's really, really awesome and I've solved problems in production that wouldn't ever be found normally.