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In the spirit of this question I wanted to have a sense of what is the proportion of time split between fixing bugs and implementing new features. If possible try to give an estimate for the product as a whole as opposed to individual developer stats and try to make an average over the course of a typical year. Do provide a general descriptive of the product/project to allow comparison. Specifically :

  • Maturity of project
  • Is it still actively developed or strictly in maintenance ?
  • Size estimate of the product/project
  • Size of team developing it (all inclusive)
  • What is your team score on the Joel test.

Ex :

  • approx 80% time spent bug fixes 20% new stuff
  • Mature software (20 years old)
  • Actively developed
  • 1.5M Line of Text, approx 700k - 900k LOC
  • 12-15 actively coding in it.
  • we got 5/12 for sure, some would say 7/12.
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I would estimate: New features 70%, Bugs 10%, Technical debt (refactoring etc.) 20%

  • Maturity: 2 years
  • Actively developed
  • Team size: 8
  • LOC: 50k-100k
  • Joel Test: 9/12

You didn't ask for technology stack but if you are interested it's Ruby on Rails

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  • This is almost the same as my current project. Differences are Joel test is lower, its asp.net/c#, and lower team size.
    – corymathews
    Commented Mar 25, 2010 at 13:24
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I'd estimate we spend around 70% of our time on new features and 30% on Bugs.

  • Maturity 10 years
  • Actively developed
  • Team size 14 (1 manager, 1 tester, 1 UI designer, 11 developers (8 on new features and 3 dedicated to maintenance))
  • 2.2M lines of text (950K actual code)
  • Joel Test 10/12
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  • Great thanks... May not be significant statistically but there seems to be a correlation between the Joel Test and the ratio. Although I am not surprised by this find it is nice to see data going this way.
    – Newtopian
    Commented Mar 26, 2010 at 3:25
  • 1
    An interesting observation regarding the Joel Test. We certainly didn't start out on this development with a 10 score (it was more like a 5), but we added the others over time which has helped with the ratio. Another thing to note is that our ratio has also changed over time. About 2 years ago we spent approx 50% of our time on Bugs before splitting the team and really trying to focus on new development.
    – Big GH
    Commented Mar 26, 2010 at 13:16
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  • 50% debugging, 50% new code (and personally I want the debugging part to be lower)
  • Software is 15 years old
  • 1.5M line of text (with 170K empty lines, 250K lines of comment, 800K lines of actual code)
  • about 10 people developing on it
  • Joel Test: 8/12
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3
  • sounds like we are in a similar situation. What you think is the primary reason you spend so much time on bug fixing and what could you do to reduce this figure ?
    – Newtopian
    Commented Mar 19, 2010 at 1:08
  • Problems: Some parts of the software have become too complex. Software is too flexible (allows too many configurations) so we can never foresee all possible configuration combinations. Solutions: Better scope determination. Keep things simple. Test sooner. Automated testing. Make sure developers can focus on their task. Make people responsible for the quality.
    – Patrick
    Commented Mar 19, 2010 at 12:20
  • yes... this sounds familiar... The software slowly becoming a platform to do everything but end up not doing anything right without copious amount of scripting in a proprietary scripting language, that, in itself is also becoming a platform... yikes
    – Newtopian
    Commented Mar 23, 2010 at 1:14
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From our time tracking software I see our teams feature/defect ratio of last year is:

  • 75% feature tasks
  • 25% defect tasks

Other stats:

  • Software is ~10 years old
  • 4M lines of text
  • Currently 11 developers
  • Joel Test: 7/12
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  • 50% New features, 25% bug fixing, 25% testing
  • Actively developed
  • 9M lines of text
  • around 25
  • 9/12

We're developing a game (c++) using our own framework and engine, so it is actively developed. The stats above are rounded up from our tracking software, however I could make a note here that while developing minor bugs are already resolved without creating a bug listing for it.

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