Bugs Kill Productivity and Schedule Accuracy 5
The title may seem obvious. Here is some hard data.
SD Times recently reported on a survey done by Forrester Research on the pernicious effects of bugs on development productivity. The developers and managers surveyed said they take an average of six days to resolve issues and they spend an average 3 out of every 10 hours working on various stages of troubleshooting, including initial investigation, documenting their findings, and resolving the problems.
The survey puts some data behind an intuitive sense (of gloom…) that many teams have about the problem.
For me, this is further evidence of why the practices of Extreme Programming (XP), especially Test-Driven Development (TDD), are so important. To a high degree, TDD ensures that the software is really working and that regressions are caught and fixed quickly. TDD also provides an unambiguous definition of “done”; do the automated tests pass? The feedback on which stories are really done tells the team its true velocity and hence how many story points will be finished by a given target date. Also, you spend far less unplanned and unpredictable time debugging problems.
Hence, productivity and schedule accuracy tend to be much better for XP teams. Over time, as the software grows in size and complexity, the automated test suite will keep delivering “dividends”, by continuing to catch regressions and by empowering the team to do the aggressive refactorings that are necessary to keep the software evolving to meet new requirements.
The SD Times article goes on to say that
... two-thirds of the responding managers indicated that a solution that reduced the time spent on resolving application problems would be of interest if it created significant efficiencies and improved quality.
The article concludes with a quote that automated testing is one solution. I agree. Just make sure it is the XP kind of automated testing.
Excellent, can we have the follow articles about bears defacating in woods and the stunning revelations of the pope’s catholicism.
You might think it’s so obvious, but it’s like the idea that dieting is all about increasing output and decreasing input: it is obvious, but people live as if it were not true. Sadly, myself included.
I have been plenty of places where over 60% of developer time went to bug fixes, and software was late, and they were sure that the answer was to pressure their staff to work longer hours and write code more quickly, or that they should hire cheaper, less experienced developers to help.
It’s sort of like “effective athiesm”, in which one claims to be a true believer, but then lives as if it didn’t matter at all.
When we don’t use TDD, when we don’t refactor, when we don’t work together, and when we don’t communicate the system faithfully shows us the error of our ways. When we stray off the path, we fall down: this is how we know it’s a good path.
LIkewise, when we make decisions as if bugs did not slow us down, we are denying an “obvious” reality. The system is real, and we can’t break the rules. We can only break ourselves against them.
Of course it’s human. If I could live according to all the good ideas that I mentally affirm, my life would be doubly healthy. There is a human tendency toward comfortable self-destruction. People tend to change when the perceived pain of staying the same is greater than the perceived pain of changing.
So maybe the point isn’t merely that this is true, but that we should try making decisions as if we really believed it to be true.
Right. This stuff is obvious to readers of this blog (hopefully!), but we all know that common sense isn’t all that common.
Sometimes a little “hard” data like this can open a few eyes.
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