Problem Resolution, or What the Boss Doesn't Know...

So how much time do you spend fixing bugs and troubleshooting testing-team reports? Well, if you're like a lot of software developers, you spend about a third of your time fixing bugs. But here's the good news: Your boss probably doesn't know that, at least according to a recent study conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of BMC Software.

The survey of 150 managers, directors, and vice presidents in charge of application development teams, found that:

• A third of managers underestimate the time spent on problem resolution and almost as many don’t even think about it, either through acceptance of the status quo or because they do not recognize the connection between time spent on problems and lost development cycles.
• Developers spend 29 percent of their time investigating and resolving application problems in testing and maintenance. If the time that test and support staff spend on gathering information and documenting problems is taken into account, the overall time may be significantly higher.
• 45 percent of respondents take over an hour to create a single defect report.
• Despite all the effort expended to identify and fix issues, 25 percent of problems are returned marked "not reproducible," which leads to extended, iterative cycles and applications being released with known defects.
• On average, application problems take more than six days to resolve and more than a third take more than three days. This can cause ripple effects in the development cycle and impact software release dates.

"Forrester Consulting’s findings are consistent with what we hear from our customers: problem resolution is a time-consuming process that steals time from developers’ core responsibility of creating new software applications," said Eldad Maniv of BMC’s Identify Software which, it should be mentioned, develops problem resolution tools. For more details, listen to this webcast.

-- Jonathan Erickson
jerickson@ddj.com

Posted by Jon Erickson at 06:04 PM  Permalink