I'm trying to find a research answering a question: How much time developers spend on development vs debugging?. I found several interesting links on the Net but they are little too old.This 2002 RTI study states that software bugs cost U.S. economy $59.6 billion annually. And in this book Beizer (1990) reports that of the labor expended to develop a working program, 50% is typically spent on testing and debugging activities. I've seen this number is 80% but can't find the link.
Debugging Facts and Statistics
debugging;statistics
In Rapid Development: Taming Wild Software Schedules, Steve McConnell cites a few articles by Capers Jones, Barry Boehm, Thomas Glib, and Philip Papaccio. Some of the figures he references are:Reworking defects in requirements, design, and code consumes 40-50% of the total cost of software development. (Boehm, Barry W. 1987. Improving Software Productivity. IEEE Computer, September: 43-57.; Jones, Capers, ed. 1986. Tutorial: Programming Productivity: Issues for the Eighties, 2nd ed. Los Angeles: IEEE Computer Society Press.)Every hour spent on defect prevention will reduce repair time by 3-10 hours. (Jones, Capers. 1994. Assessment and Control of Software Risks. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Yourdon Press.)Reworking a requirements problem once the software has shipped costs 50-200 times what it would take to rework during requirements. (Boehm, Barry W., and Philip N. Papaccio. 1988. Understanding and Controlling Software Costs. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, vol. 14, no. 10 (October): 1462-1477.)60% of all defects usually exist at design time. (Glib, Tom. 1988. Principles of Software Engineering Management. Wokingham, England: Addison-Wesley.)Some of these sources deal with a difference in time. I don't have any hard evidence to back this up (it might be in the papers), but I would suspect that a good chunk of the total cost is paying the developers for their time, so using either time or cost would be a valid comparison from a project management perspective. I would suggest reading the papers, though.