Finding and fixing bugs is a core part of development, in dev and in production both. But is there a way to do it in less time? There is.

A Stripe poll of thousands of people in the software industry found that the average development team spends up to 42% of its time on work in service of fixing bugs. That's nearly half of every developer's time spent maintaining old code instead of writing new code.

We've spent years helping teams claw some of that time back (we build a crash reporting tool), and across all of it the same four levers keep showing up. Teams that pull them see their crash rates drop and their support load shrink:

  1. Find and fix bugs earlier in development
  2. Actively monitor deployed applications for bugs
  3. Decide what to work on first using real user data
  4. Understand defects without having to replicate them

Here's why each one works.

#1 Find and fix bugs earlier in development

Shipping a version is a lot like a moving train. Stop one at the station and it takes almost nothing. Stop one at full speed and you're fighting all that momentum.

Bugs work the same way. The longer a defect rides along toward launch, the more code, dependencies, and stakeholders pile on top of it, and the more it costs to pull out. A bug caught the day it's written is cheap. The same bug found in late testing is a project.

So the earlier you catch them, the less you fight later. Our users set this up by integrating BugSplat at the start of development, so crash and error reporting runs from day one. When a crash happens in dev, the details about the underlying defect land in BugSplat, get turned into a ticket in your bug tracker, and get assigned and fixed fast - while the train's still at the station.

#2 Actively monitor deployed applications for bugs

Call this one "don't wait for users to tell you."

Too many teams ship with no real system to track stability and surface critical defects before they spread. So they find out about their own bugs from a support email, a tweet, or a thread somewhere they weren't looking.

And by then it's late. The rough rule: for every user who goes out of their way to report a problem, a hundred more already hit it and just got quietly annoyed. Once a complaint reaches you, the bug has already done its damage, and now it's costing you support time on top of everything else.

The usual culprit is tooling. Teams monitoring across a dozen deployed environments end up with a patchwork of separate tools, and checking all of them is enough of a chore that it stops happening. We hear it constantly: people weren't watching performance or setting alerts because there were too many places to look. Put every crash report in one tool with alerts that actually fire, and monitoring goes from a chore to automatic.

#3 Decide what to work on first using real user data

Not all bugs are equal, and not every bug has to be fixed to keep users happy. The skill is telling the critical ones apart from the noise.

Nobody knows your codebase like the team that built it, so teams lean on that instinct to judge whether a bug matters. That instinct is real, but on its own it's a guess. Without a way to capture every crash and rank it by how often it fires and how many users it hits, you're triaging on gut feel, and gut feel misses things.

BugSplat pairs your knowledge of your own app with hard data on what's actually breaking and for whom. You fix the worst offenders first and stop letting a high-impact defect slip through because it didn't happen to land in your inbox.

#4 Understand defects without having to replicate them

A huge chunk of the support process is just reproducing a bug before you can fix it. The old way: a developer spends hours, sometimes days, trying to recreate the exact conditions of a crash, only to find it's intermittent and barely repeatable. The bugs stack up, the queue grows, quality slips.

BugSplat skips that step. It collects the crash data that matters - stack trace, environment, user context - and lays it out so you can see what went wrong without recreating it yourself. You get the context of the crash handed to you instead of reverse-engineering it.

And because it all lives in one place, the whole team is looking at the same report. Less time spent on manual reproduction, more time spent on the actual fix.

Final thoughts

For a lot of teams, the real cost of unstable code runs well past 42%, once you count the features that never got built because everyone was busy chasing crashes.

That's the number worth shrinking. Catch bugs earlier, watch your live builds in one place, fix the ones that matter most first, and skip the replication grind. Each one buys back developer time, and together they free your team to work on the things that actually move the product forward.

Want to try it on your own crashes? Sign up for free here: https://app.bugsplat.com/v2/sign-up