Bug Fix Time not a good metric

Eli Lopian    Code Integrity, Product    

After a few weeks using the BugFixTime metric, I found that metric too hard to understand and leaves the developer and managers clueless to what that have to do to fix the metric.

We have done some internal thinking and some feedback and have created the next generation of this tool built to help teams develop with integrity

With this tool we can see the percent of time we are spending writing unit tests,  what percent we spend debugging our application and what is left writing production code.

The theory is that we debug our code when there is a bug, but when this is done without a unit test, then we are Manually testing, and the time we spend doing this is longer (we have to setup the environment) then doing this via a unit test, and is not as cost beneficial as writing a test – a unit that can be automatically run.

We found that when developing with unit tests, the percent of time spent debugging drops drastically and that time is spend writing the unit tests. But we get more value for our buck – we get a security net of automatically tested code.

In other words – we end up spend about the same amount of time writing production code, but we get better quality and so we need to spend less time in the integration/system testing phase.

We are able to see the metrics over time and see how much are improving.

The metrics are connected to a Typemock Server that enables us to see the total amounts for our teams, and show how much time we are spending unit testing, how much time we are saving from debugging, and how much the tests are protecting us.

Here is what the Team view looks like

Currently the tool works for msTest and is tested for Visual Studio 2008.

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