The Cost of Fixing Bugs and How You Can Get Ahead of Them With Codiga

Bugs are an inevitable part of the coding process, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn't take as many precautions to try and avoid them as you possibly can. To put it simply, bugs not only cost a ton of money, but they can also eat up valuable employee time and resources that can distract from other tasks that need to be prioritized in order to meet a deadline.

“Most defects end up costing more than it would have cost to prevent them. Defects are expensive when they occur, both the direct costs of fixing the defects and the indirect costs because of damaged relationships, lost business, and lost development time”. — Kent Beck, Extreme Programming Explained

Whether you’re working with a team of coders, or coding a project solo, knowing how to get on top of bugs as early in the process as possible will make a huge impact on the success of your project.

According to an article written by Gitenital.com :

“A 2020 Report by Herb Krasner of CISQ estimates the cost of bugs at roughly $607 billion for the United States alone. This includes costs associated with unsuccessful projects, maintaining legacy systems, and software failures in operational systems. It doesn’t include security issues, technical debt, or a host of other “quality” issues having an overall price tag of over $2 trillion”.

The thing about bugs is that they are so common and happen so often that coders are typically faced with multiple bugs in a short period of time and must consider how to prioritize. Outside of the monetary cost involved with finding and fixing bugs, it’s important to differentiate between the actual cost of fixing a bug and the consequences that may result from not fixing it.

If you want to weigh up the cost of fixing a bug vs preventing it, Quantifying the cost of fixing vs. preventing bugs, by Lynda Gaines gives a great breakdown. Gaines looked at the book “How Google Tests Software – Help me test like Google,” which details the story of the evolution of Google’s software testing process.

Google was able to successfully reduce the amount of time and money being spent fixing bugs after determining that 40% of their engineers' time was being spent on this task. Google took into consideration multiple factors like team size, yearly salary of an engineer, number of bugs in code etc to produce a formula that helped them make the necessary changes in order for their team to be less consumed by bug-fixing.

Using a formula such as this to identify the actual cost oif how much it costs to fix a bug should be a top priority for any tech team leader so they truly understand the negative impact it can have on a team's productivity, as well as their bottom line. Once you understand the costs involved, it's time to take action and start implementing processes that are designed to prevent bugs. Establishing a thorough code review process is the most important thing you can do to get ahead of costly bugs. It is much easier to detect flaws in code when engineers are still writing it. Bugs caught early in the coding life cycle process are much easier and cost-efficient to fix. Bugs caught in the later phases of production cost, on average, 30 times more to fix than bugs caught at an earlier stage.

Once the software is in the testing phase, identifying and reproducing the bugs can be an extremely time-consuming task that can halt the progression of your project.

When a piece of software has been released and a bug is present, it can pose risks to active users and do damage to the reputation of a product. That’s why it is absolutely vital that software engineers are employed.

When a piece of software has been released, and a bug is present, it can pose risks to active users and do damage to the reputation of a product. That’s why it is absolutely vital that software engineers are employed.

Preventing Bugs with Codiga

Codiga has a number of features that have all been designed to save software engineers valuable time in their day. A combination of manual and automated code reviews is always a good idea to ensure you’re catching as many bugs as possible. With Codiga, you can do real-time code reviews, follow code quality metrics, and ensure that your development team stays on track. Codiga’s Code Review tool is designed to complement the manual review process, not replace it. It provides instant feedback directly in your working environment. When using Code Review, Codiga’s Automated Code Review algorithm will detect defective code and highlight potential issues prior to you submitting it for a standard manual review. This can save a team countless hours of time and stress and make the manual code review process a lot easier,

Additionally, our Coding Assistant tool and Smart Code Snippets is another way to prevent bugs in the long run. When working on a task, it’s no secret that engineers use code snippets. These reusable blocks of code can form the basis of a task and mitigate the need for a coder to write repetitive code that has already been created by other developers. Oftentimes, these code snippets are sourced online. This can not only be time-consuming, but these code snippets can also contain defects themselves, which can lead to more serious bugs later in the project if not detected earlier.

That's why Codiga developed Smart Code Snippets. Smart Code Snippets allows you to find, add, store and use code snippets, without having to leave your IDE! This tool is a game-changer for productivity because it gives users access to a growing library of Smart Code Snippets that have been added and vetted by thousands of other developers who use our platform. Smart Code Snippets can be found within our Coding Assistant tool. You can download the Codiga plugin for VS Code, Jetbrains, or Chrome to bring all of the functionality to your chosen IDE. Once you have installed the plugin, you can search for Smart Code Snippets on the Codiga Hub.

This search engine houses all code snippets that have been added by our network, and allows you to favor code snippets so that they populate in your IDE when needed. You can also add your own Smart Code Snippet that can be shared with the entire Codiga platform, privately or with a specified team. The team sharing option is also an ideal way to get ahead of bugs, as it allows teams to easily share their coding patterns with one another which in turn saves time doing repetitive work and therefore minimizes the risk of bugs occurring.

Wrapping Up

If you can get into the mindset of preventing bugs at all costs instead of scrambling to fix them when they occur, the benefits to both team morale and your company's bottom line will be infinite. It’s impossible to plan for every bug that might occur, and that's ok. But once you have armed your team with the right processes to get ahead of as many of them as possible, you’ll be well on your way to significantly reducing costs across the board.

To learn more about Codiga’s features and how we can help you save time in your workflow, head to codiga.io or reach out to our team on Discord!