How much of your day

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Percentage of time spent troubleshooting

10
1
9%
20
3
27%
30
1
9%
40
2
18%
50
0
No votes
60
1
9%
70
2
18%
80
0
No votes
90
1
9%
100
0
No votes
 
Total votes: 11

alex.barylski
DevNet Evangelist
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Location: Winnipeg

How much of your day

Post by alex.barylski »

Is spent troubleshooting or finding bugs, not fixing them, etc.

If your primary job responsibility is bug squasher please indicate so in the replies.

Cheers,
Alex
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Jonah Bron
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Re: How much of your day

Post by Jonah Bron »

I voted 30%, but thinking about it, it's probably closer to 20%. I actually like the challenge of a good (bad) bug.

The other 70% is on Devnet ;)
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John Cartwright
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Re: How much of your day

Post by John Cartwright »

Probably around 10%. Unit tests + QA department + Testing department handles most of this for me.

Most of the bugs I'll come across are usually from integration testing, which are basically impossible to predict.

The other 90% on devnet.
alex.barylski
DevNet Evangelist
Posts: 6267
Joined: Tue Dec 21, 2004 5:00 pm
Location: Winnipeg

Re: How much of your day

Post by alex.barylski »

I love how you guys mentioned DN as a time consumer. If you are lucky enough to have a QA department, I would be curious to know how much time relative to the whole of a project, was spent on finding bugs.
I actually like the challenge of a good (bad) bug.
It's important to note I meant specifically the diagnosis of a bug, not finding it, or solving it. Rather, you found a bug (or customer), logged it in a bug tracker, estimated it's time to completion/correction. It's this actual time spent diagnosing a bug, figuring out what is wrong, that I am trying to better understand.

I have for years, invested a great deal of personal (and company) time trying to record/calculate metrics to monitor my performance

Cheers,
Alex
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John Cartwright
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Re: How much of your day

Post by John Cartwright »

It's a tough one to answer because it varies from bug to bug. For instance, we have a bug with our event processing system which is sending multiple emails for a specific event. However, it is a lot more complicated than that because it involves a server farm with file based and MySQL replication, among other complications. We have a team that has been working on this for 2 weeks.

On the other hand, bugs in the codebase are generally squashed very quickly (minutes) because of unit testing.

I would say Unit Tests are the biggest time saver when it comes to bugs in the code. The upfront time costs are nothing compared to the time you'll save when working with a heavily developed and large codebase to identify bugs.
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Jenk
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Re: How much of your day

Post by Jenk »

We write software to solve problems, so 100% :p

But seriously, about 40% of my time is spent on deviations. A very small percentage of that is bugs, most of it refactoring and removing code smells.
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