A manager recently announced that were were spending far too much time fixing bugs. I guess he thinks we should write perfect code all the time (whilst still hitting those impossible deadlines of course!) and it made me wonder what the industry average of time spent bug fixing v writing new code was.
So does anyone have any metrics on time spent bug fixing against new code development? Or is there any empirical analysis of bug fixing time for the industry as a whole? Is 50% spent bug fixing too much, or about right? How about 20% or 33%?
I'm happy to accept anecdotal evidence from personal experience as that would form part of some statistics here that I could compare our performance against.
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Above sounds very ignorant. Suggested reading for cases like that: Facts and Fallacies of Software Engineering by Robert L. Glass, particularly "Fact 43. Maintenance is a solution, not a problem."
Wikipedia article mentions 80% efforts spent on software maintenance.
Hm given above I'd also take some efforts in analyzing whether all the requests you do are bugs indeed.
In my experience it was way too often that requests for enhancements or new features were submitted as bugs. Good managers involve their programmers in finding out about that - bad managers, well, just keep complaining about too much time fixing bugs.