Error resolution is an important part of any eCommerce company. Errors, when left unchecked, can be quite costly for online retailers, so it’s critical for teams to work together to ensure any newly detected site bugs are caught and resolved as quickly as possible.
Unfortunately, much of that resolution burden falls onto developers’ shoulders, and as many developers know, today’s process for website error resolution can be time-consuming, tedious, and frustrating. In fact, in a survey conducted into the attitudes developers have towards debugging, more than 40% of respondents said that fixing errors is their biggest pain point at work.
Developers are embittered, but it’s detrimental for errors to stay live on a website. So with that in mind, let’s quickly explore why developers need to recreate in order to resolve, and then see if we can change the narrative that the only way to debug and find the root cause of an error is to spend hours on replication workflows.
Why developers need to reproduce errors
In order to understand why an error happened and how to fix it, developers must first reproduce an error in their development environment. Reproduction workflows allow developers to gather key pieces of information, such as affected browsers, operating systems, integration API calls, console logs, etc. This can be very time consuming: it requires copious amounts of exploratory trial and error, along with multiple rounds of tests for each step.
With this process in place, just over a quarter of surveyed developers are spending more than half of their sprint time on debugging efforts. With developers being the backbone of a company, that time drain is just not acceptable anymore – not to business leaders, and certainly not to developers.
“More than half of developers (55%) said that if they didn’t have to spend so much time fixing bugs, they would have the time to build new features and functionality.”
(Businesswire)
Why not all errors need to be debugged
In addition to being inefficient and frustrating for developers, misdiagnosed bugs also lead to wasted development resources.
Without access to the proper data before kicking off the debugging workflow, developers won’t have a full understanding of the cause, or severity, of an error. Without this data, developers won’t know if the error they’ve been tasked to address will actually bring about a significantly positive impact.
Thus they face the possibility of putting aside a new website feature in favor of fixing a bug that may not affect conversion. They also risk spending hours attempting to recreate the error, only to discover later, after the fix has been implemented, that the error was unlikely to harm the business’ revenue potential.
How to make debugging eCommerce websites more efficient
Is there a better way to debug eCommerce errors than through replication workflows? Not without access to the right data, at the right time.
The only way to reduce the need for tedious error replications is for developers to have access to all the technical and situational information needed to understand the root cause of an error, and to have this available with each support ticket and error resolution request that comes in.
Luckily, there is a platform that developers can use to gather all that data and more…
How this eCommerce tool saves your development teams’ hours
Noibu’s error monitoring platform is built to detect all customer-impacting site issues at the console and handler level, while also collecting all the information surrounding the error.
The software picks up on all relevant technical and situational data, including last-step-taken, error url(s), and browsers and devices most affected. While these data points are helpful in pointing developers in the right direction as to how to begin solving an error, they are not enough to eliminate the need for replication on their own.
Where repetitive replication processes can be cut down on, though, is when developers also have access to the stack trace and the specific line of code that produced the bug.
Both of these key assets are also provided for developers in the Noibu platform, within the dedicated Developer tab. Users can also view real-time session recordings of errors to get a better idea of the contextual impact the issue is having on customers.
With access to this level of data, Noibu customers have seen their average time to resolution decrease by 70%.
Rather than approximately 17.5 hours of every sprint being dedicated to error resolution per developer, the average Noibu-using developer only spends around 4.5 hrs on error resolution. This gives them a lot of time back in their day to focus on what they actually love doing: developing new code.
How to Get This for Your Team
eCommerce companies can personally request a Proof of Concept (POC) from Noibu, here.
For more information about the POC, navigate to The Noibu Trial: Why We Do a Proof of Concept.
Once the tag is deployed on your website, the platform immediately starts gathering data to bring into the console to help your teams identify new and existing bugs, prioritize them based on business impact, and debug them without losing hours to replication workflows.
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Error resolution is an important part of running any eCommerce company, and it’s important for teams to work together to ensure any new site bugs are resolved as quickly as possible. However, without access to the right data at the right time, developers get stuck in time-consuming, tedious, and frustrating replication workflows. Noibu helps to alleviate the need for error reproductions, allowing the development team to get back to their regular sprint projects.
Interested in exploring how Noibu can help your team? Send us a message at info@noibu.com!
