Do You Need To Fix All Bugs?

It’s a dream of every software developer to make a software that is free of bugs. But development isn’t that easy, is it? Because with every fix, you could end up filling more bugs in your software.

Application Stability

Bug fixing is all about managing risks. You can never develop an application with zero bugs. To deal with them, you need an effective strategy. This is where application stability targets step in. Stability can be defined as a percentage of successful application interactions per number of sessions in a given release. It is calculated by tracking the percentage of crashes (unhandled errors) explained by users of your application, with the help of defect management tools.

To understand stability targets, you need to understand availability. Beyond a certain point, the returns start to diminish as high availability targets are costly and don’t add significant value. It’s the same case for stability - bug fixing gets too expensive due to the high opportunity cost of building new features. Therefore, realistic targets need to be redefined for both stability and availability.

Here’s Why…

The Dominance of Agile

The majority of the development world today practices Agile methodologies. Agile has enabled teams to build and ship the products faster and iterate their work frequently and quickly. But most importantly, teams are now able to easily fix issues after launch with faster release cycles, meaning that it’s not critical to eliminate all the bugs before the release. The problem is that, in Agile, there is very little time for QA testing which increases the chances of bugs slipping through to production. For that, you need a feedback loop for your application’s stability which can be tracked with a stability monitoring tool.

Customers Will Find An Alternative

That’s right. If your software doesn’t deliver, your customers will look for other solutions. Therefore, prioritizing bugs that the customer is likely to encounter is of utmost importance.

Client-Side Applications

Not all bugs are equal, and this is true especially for client-side applications.

JavaScript is the most commonly used programming language as approximately 70% of developers use it. One of the challenges it poses is that once you’ve deployed to the browser, the application can run into various conditions. It’s almost impossible to consider all possible scenarios given the vast number of browsers, extensions, versions, and other factors that can impact your application’s stability. There will be a large number of stability issues that won’t affect most of your users.

Turn Stability Into A KPI

Make sure that your stability targets are realistic. These targets will help you make data-driven decisions around your engineering resources. Application stability also helps you decide whether you should move full-steam ahead on your product roadmap or allocate time for bug-fixing problems. Always ensure that essential feedback loops are in place and you continue to make strategies that are helping your processes to improve.

All of these discussed issues can be solved using capable defect management tools that are essential to effective bug fixing.