Are you frustrated by the quality of your product? Maybe you’ve heard about bugs from your team members, but they can’t be reproduced. You’re pretty sure things aren’t working correctly, but developers say, “It works on my machine.” Your day is filled with meetings clarifying requirements and ensuring bugs marked as fixed are actually fixed.
Software developers spend 35-50 percent of their time validating and debugging software.
The debugging mindset
Between local, staging, and remote environments, split tests, feature flags, and—worst of all—caching, it can be impossible to reproduce many bugs. You can’t peer over the shoulder of your remote employees. Your less-technical team members don’t know how to “speak developer,” and your technical team members don’t want to spend valuable time repeatedly trying to reproduce bugs.
Squash the bugs!
It’s essential to find and fix bugs quickly. The longer a bug exists in your product, the more expensive it is to fix later. However, developers report spending more than 50% of their time testing1 and are consistently under pressure to ship features.
The cost of debugging, testing, and verification is estimated to account for 50-75 percent of the total budget of software development projects, amounting to more than $100 billion annually.
THE DEBUGGING MINDSET
This is why we’re excited to launch the Replayable Bug Bash program. Replayable is a desktop screen recorder that makes it easy for your entire team to catch bugs as they happen. No more “Cannot be reproduced.” or “It works on my machine.” Our bug bash is an hourlong bug-seeking team event using Replayable to document any finds. In the end, you’ll leave more confident about your product and a more efficient way to document your bugs.
What is a bug bash?
In software development, a bug bash is a procedure where all the developers, testers, program managers, usability researchers, designers, documentation folks, and sometimes even marketing people put aside their regular day-to-day duties and “pound on the product”—i.e, exercises the product in every way they can think of. Because each person will use the product in slightly—or very—different ways, and the product is getting a great deal of use in a short amount of time, this approach can reveal bugs relatively quickly. 2
What is Replayable?
Replayable runs in the background of your computer, recording an hour of screen-recorded video in a loop. Whenever a team member encounters a bug, they can grab a screen recording demonstrating precisely what happened and share it with the product team in under 30 seconds. The product team will have all the information they need to triage the issue without screencasts or worse…meetings.
Replayable is super performant and privacy-first. Video is recorded locally, and everyone has the option to crop and trim the video before uploading. Once uploaded, the video is stored encrypted at rest and unlisted until shared.
Replayable Bug Bash Program
Our Bug Bash program is a one-hour event that pounds your product for bugs and trains your team on how to open better bug reports, establishing a culture of dogfooding. Best of all, it’s totally free! Here’s how it works:
- First, schedule a 30-minute call with us so we can learn more about your product and test process. Typically you’ll choose one part of one product to test per bug bash. Before this call, you should have an idea of a scenario to focus on.
- We’ll work together asynchronously to schedule the bug bash. We’ll provide you with emails and send reminders to your team.
- Get to it! The bug bash will happen over a one-hour video call involving many members of your team. Here’s how it will go:
- 15 minutes: Intro, Bug Bash objectives, Replayable Demo + Onboarding
- 45 minutes: Team attempts to find bugs in your scenario
- We’ll follow up to learn about how it went and award prizes to your participants!
Not only will your team find actual bugs during our call, but your team will walk away with the tools to report bugs from their everyday dogfooding, and you’ll be able to repeat bug bashes whenever you want.
Replayable (and our bug bashes) are totally free! We’re simply seeking feedback on the app and partners to inspire our team features. Here’s the catch: We have a limited number of spots available, so be sure to schedule your onboarding call!