At BugSplat, we always advocate for teams to introduce crash reporting and establish a bug-tracking/bug-fixing workflow early in their development process. So you can imagine my excitement when I found myself at Denver Startup Week chatting with the founder of a startup that has several projects in flight. He mentioned they’d just kicked off development of a new application, and things were moving quickly.

However, there was one issue: during a team meeting the previous week, he realized they hadn’t yet implemented crash reporting or linked it to their internal bug tracker (they use Jira). In his words, it was a total casus belli—a justification for war—and he immediately had the team prioritize setting up a workflow to track crashes and automatically log them in their bug tracker.

What made this conversation interesting wasn’t the fact that I, an open crash reporting enthusiast (I was even wearing a BugSplat hat), was hearing the praises of crash reporting. Instead, it was how passionately this founder stressed the importance of implementing it early in the development process. His reasoning was simple: the longer bugs go undetected, the more expensive, complex, and frustrating they become to fix. Catching them early, while the project is still in the hands of the developers, saves time, headaches, and those dreaded “whoops, sorry about that” emails to users post-release.

Integrating crash reporting early might not catch every issue right away, especially if the project isn’t in the testing phase yet. But when something does come up, it can be automatically reported and logged in Jira (or any bug-tracking tool) to get fixed as you go.

Now, I understand that there are different approaches to this. Some teams worry that fixing bugs too early might derail momentum. Many of our users prefer to tackle bugs later, during a dedicated bug-squashing phase.

But, as someone who works closely with a team that builds a top-notch crash reporter syncing effortlessly with Jira, I can’t help but advocate for setting up crash reporting early. It’s easier to fix issues when fewer cooks have been in the kitchen, and the obstacles to implementing those fixes are much lower. Trust me—it’ll save you time, and possibly, a lot of headaches down the road.