The 80/20 Rule of Bug Fixing

At BugSplat, we've been supporting applications and video games with crash and error reporting for a long time. Over the years, we've collaborated with a wide range of teams, handling applications of all sizes.

From our experience and numerous conversations with users, we've noticed an interesting trend: the distribution of crashes isn't uniform.

If your application experiences 100 crashes in a given version, those crashes aren't caused by 100 different defects. Instead, a large percentage of crashes stem from a relatively small number of defects. Identifying and fixing these critical defects is the most efficient way to significantly improve your application's stability.

In fact, these defects-to-crashes roughly follow the famous 80/20 rule, also known as the Pareto principle. Sometimes, the distribution is even more extreme, with 10%, 5%, or even 1% of defects causing the majority of user crashes.

What stands out is that efficiently identifying and addressing these key defects can greatly enhance your code's stability, saving you substantial time and resources.

In other words, there's a lot of time, energy, and budget to be saved and reapplied if you can successfully identify your top ~20% of defects.

Identifying the 20% with BugSplat

To help you better identify and address the top ~20% of bugs causing the lion's share of crashes, here are some technical suggestions for dialing in your BugSplat integration:

1. Collect Crashes and Errors in Production: Ensure your production environment is configured to report crashes and errors. This data is crucial for understanding how your application behaves under real-world conditions.
2. Use Crash Grouping Effectively: Make sure you are taking full advantage of BugSplat's crash grouping features. Grouping crashes by type, stack trace similarity, and other criteria helps you quickly identify the most frequent issues.
3. Analyze Trends on the Summary Page: Regularly review the Summary page to identify trends and outliers in your crash data. This page provides an overview of the most critical defects and their impact, helping you prioritize your efforts effectively.
4. Set Up Automated Notifications: Configure automated notifications for critical crashes. This ensures that your team is immediately aware of significant issues and can respond promptly.
5. Integrate with Your Workflow: Use BugSplat's integrations with tools like Jira, Slack, and GitHub to streamline your workflow.
6. Leverage Real-Time Updates: Enable real-time updates to stay informed about new crashes as they occur.
7. Advanced Search and Filtering: Use BugSplat's advanced search and filtering capabilities to dig deeper into your crash data.
8. Utilize Custom Attributes: Leverage custom attributes to add context to your crash reports.

By following these technical suggestions, you can fine-tune your BugSplat integration to better identify and prioritize the top 20% of bugs causing the most significant crashes.

This approach will help you enhance your application's stability and provide a better experience for your users. For more information on effective bug tracking and crash reporting, check out our BugSplat Blog.