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

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?