Inneffective communications are hindering the management of
application developers' time, including bug fixing work, the
Dynamic Markets study revealed.
The method of solving a problem depends on the type of bug, but
Cherie Taylor, managing director at Dynamic Markets, said a
weakness among the businesses surveyed was the length of time they
took to communicate problems to their IT departments.
And communications problems persisted once the problem had been
logged with the IT department, the survey found.
The average proportion of time spent actually fixing, rather than
communicating a problem was 36%. Some 40% of technical support and
application developers questioned spent less than 25% of their time
fixing a problem. The remainder of their time was spent reproducing
the problem on test systems and communicating it to other team
members and people in the company, the survey found.
Worryingly, more than 20% of IT managers surveyed said they were
unsure what percentage of their application development teams' time
was being spent on supporting live applications.
In fact, IT directors in manufacturing companies thought their
application developers spent the least amount of their time solving
live application problems - they actually spent more time on this
than other areas.
The findings reflect research due to be published by Butler Group
in November. Michael Azoff, senior research analyst at Butler
Group, said, "Eighty per cent of software costs occur in the
production stage."
He said a lot of time and effort was being expended fixing bugs
once the software was in production. Often the lead developers in
an organisation are called in when a serious bug is
encountered.
A report published by US government organisation the National
Institute of Standards and Technology in May 2002 found that the
annual cost to the US economy of an inadequate infrastructure for
software testing was an estimated £12.2bn to £32.8bn.
The Butler research also identified several other problem areas,
including application performance degradation, bandwidth issues and
capacity planning. Azoff said, "Businesses can lower support costs
and reduce downtime by running applications better."
He urged IT directors to focus on service level agreements.
"Monitoring of service is not very frequent, and so companies are
not really benefiting [from SLAs]. It is important to have tools in
place to do optimisations."
Azoff said support costs were also increasing because of the
complexity of modern applications. He recommended that users assess
technologies such as the Java Management Extensions specification,
which provides a way to build service monitoring into
applications.
Using the application to check itself - autonomic computing - is
one of the goals the IT industry is striving towards. The Dynamic
Markets survey found that users in financial institutes were ahead
of the curve with 46% of financial services users saying they used
an application's own code to solve problems.
The survey also found that 38% of technical support and application
development staff sift through code, line by line, to track
problems. Only 10% said they use specialist problem isolation
tools.
Oren Modai, vice-president of European operations at Identify
Software, said, "Application problem resolution is very difficult
because it takes time to find where the problem occurs." If a user
can speed up the time taken to identify where the bug has occurred,
in theory, the cost of support should come down.
Modai said, "Problem resolution centres on recreating and
communicating the problem." According to the Dynamic Markets
research, this is an area where application developers spent the
majority of their time.
Identity Software has developed a "black box recorder" for
application software, which monitors the code, allowing software
developers to see what has happened when a problem occurs.