What constitutes debugging? Empirical findings from live-coding streams

2 neprotivo 1 8/5/2025, 2:11:57 PM tzanko.substack.com ↗

Comments (1)

neprotivo · 1h ago
TLDR:

* Debugging takes 35%-50% of a developer's time

* In the study 79% of the time was spent on the top 26% of the bugs

* Fresh bugs appearing during ongoing work take 3 minutes to fix on average. Committed bugs appearing in the issue tracker take 29 minutes on average

* When running/testing during debugging sessions devs run the code manually (84%) rather than relying on automated tests

* When inspecting program state devs rely on looking at logs and print statements 70% of the cases and in only 30% use a debugger