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

No surprise

[tomhath]

43 percent of app developers spend between 10 and 25 percent of their time debugging application errors discovered in production

That seems like an odd metric, but it doesn't surprise me. Production support has always been expensive. Especially if you can't create a full production-like environment with real world data and stupid users to test with.

inability to fully recreate production environment

[MooseTick]

This is due to finance cheaping out and not allowing the purchase of an exact "test" system to work on. Also, the rush to production is often more important than checking to be sure it all works.

That said, its all a risk/reward thing. Maybe its often better to screw up production here and there than to spend tons of money and time on testing. It all depends if you're building software for a web site or a Mars mission. What is the impact of a failure, and is it recoverable?

Most common causes of bugs?

[Anonymous Coward]

How is "management telling people to put it into production as soon as the basic functionality works" not one of the common causes of bugs? At almost every job I've worked at, QA and Engineering would say "We need this much time to test and fix bugs before launch", and management would say "Too bad! Sales already told someone we're launching tomorrow, so we're going live with whatever we have then!"

It isn't the lack of a good test environment, or good test data, it's being told by management that you aren't going to have any time to test...

Re:inability to fully recreate production environm

[plopez]

I have never seen a methodology survive its first contact with sales.