Study: Failure to Adopt Reverse Debugging Costs Economy $41 Billion Annually

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There’s no question that computer programming bugs are costly, but are they preventable? Enter the concept of reverse debugging, which allows you to step or continue your program backward in time, reverting it to an earlier execution state.

According to recent research conducted at the University of Cambridge, the failure of organizations to adopt reverse debugging tools costs the economy $41 billion dollars of annual programming time.

This research confirms what our customers have been saying for years about the ability of TotalView to drastically reduce development time and costs during the debugging stage of software development,” stated Chris Gottbrath, Rogue Wave Principal Product Manager. “As a market leader in debugging technology, we continually advocate the time and cost savings benefit of ReplayEngine, Rogue Wave’s reverse debugging feature, and we are pleased to see robust academic research highlighting this technique as an important opportunity for the global economy.”

Researchers at the University of Cambridge’s Judge Business School conducted a survey which found that when respondents used advanced reverse debugging tools, they spent an average of 26% less time on debugging. Specifically, the time fixing bugs decreased from 25% to 18% and reworking code decreased from 25% to 19% while using reverse debuggers. This means that reverse debuggers have the potential to save 13% of total programming time, which translates to $41 billion dollars of savings to the economy or 122 more hours per year per developer towards developing additional products, features, and capabilities. Read the Full Story.