Bugs In Your Code: How Much Are They Really Costing You?

Bugs in your code might be hurting more than just the quality of your software. We dug up this infographic from SourceNinja that outlines the financial pitfalls of bugs in code - especially open source code. The findings are eye-opening!

If you're using any open source code in your project, you'll want to take a look at this, and consider taking a look at an error monitoring tool like Airbrake. It could save you a ton of time, money and grief.

Key Findings:

• • 9 out of 10 companies use open source projects.
  • 4 out of 10 companies experience problems because of third party code.
  • Only 35% of third party code is tested for bugs. Compare that to 70% of internally developed software.
  • Defective software costs $60 billion annually.

• In 2010, Coverity released an analysis of the Android kernel (a very high quality open source project). They found
  • 57 control flow issues
  • 36 error handling issues
  • 17 incorrect expressions
  • 53 incidences of insecure data handling
  • 23 issues with integer handling
  • 83 null pointer dereferences

You can't afford to have buggy open source code powering your app, but the fact of the matter is you probably do :( This is exactly why Airbrake's error monitoring tool exists. You'll be notified of all the bugs holding your code back, and be able to trace them right back to the source.

In addition to employing some kind of error reporting or monitoring tool, we recommend keeping close tabs on software updates! Open-source libraries are often maintained quite well, and keeping your code up to date could mean the difference between crippling bugs in your code and a clean, secure application. When updates for a library are dwindling, it may be time to consider moving on to a different solution.

Are there bugs in your code from open source software? Can you afford to inherit those bugs? Even if you think you can...is that how you want to maintain your application? Whether you use Airbrake or not, we highly recommend you take the time to think about these questions and come up with a plan to maintain clean and secure code.