Tag: Rollbar

Company’s Momentum Affirms Strength of Its Continuous Code Improvement Approach

San Francisco, CA, June 8, 2021 – Rollbar, the Continuous Code Improvement Platform, today announced that it has already achieved a record-breaking first half that included the addition of new customers, partnerships, programming languages, and its best ever usage numbers. This is the result of the continuous and ongoing improvements to Rollbar’s AI and machine learning tools via its automation-grade grouping features that help customers separate out the noise of irrelevant error alerts to transform their DevOps approaches at scale.

“Going into the pandemic, we knew that businesses were going to take a hard look at their spend and only keep essential services. So, we made it our business to be essential,” said Rollbar CEO and Co-founder Brian Rue. “We redoubled our commitment to our customers and took an all-hands approach to making our platform better to fulfill our vision of painless development through continuous code improvement. The accelerating growth we’ve seen is a result of our team’s excellent work.”

A Constellation of Small Feature Releases Make a Big Impact

 Rollbar used the first half of 2021 to expand its presence across multiple languages and frameworks, and to strengthen its presence within the mobile space for both Android and Apple. The company also made a number of improvements to its Continuous Code Improvement Platform that will enable more Rollbar clients to automate development workflows and responses to code issues. For example, the company:

• Improved the grouping accuracy of its automation-grade grouping, adding more than 3,000 identified error types and patterns across six languages (Ruby, JavaScript, Python, Java, PHP and C#) into its grouping engine. All machined-identified error types and patterns are tested and validated by Rollbar’s intelligence team before being pushed into production.
• Launched new Flutter SDK.
• Launched a new Apple SDK that supports tvOS and watchOS (in addition to iOS and macOS) and will automatically support any new OS.
• Released local variable support for Node.js to help developers debug faster and more easily with enhanced trace data.
• Added telemetry support for both Node.js and Go to help developers find the root cause of errors faster with critical information on user behavior, network activity, and more.
• Released HashiCorp Terraform Verified Provider for Rollbar (built in partnership with HashiCorp), so organizations can provision and manage Rollbar accounts automatically through Terraform, the most widely used multi-cloud provisioning product.
• Launched a new integration with GitHub Enterprise, so developers can access critical contextual information and debug faster directly within the Rollbar UI.

Company Growth Speaks to the Success of the Continuous Code Improvement Approach

Continuous code improvement is about giving developers more time to spend writing new code by decreasing the amount of time they need to spend finding and fixing errors. Rollbar’s recent usage growth illustrates that more and more companies are seeing the value in this approach. In the first half of 2021, the company:

• Saw a 70% YoY increase in the number of errors processed daily, which speaks to the new customers the company has attracted and existing customers using Rollbar software across mission-critical applications.
• Recorded a consistently high net promoter score (NPS). Rollbar’s NPS was 43.2 in Q1 and 44.9 in Q2—well above the SaaS industry average of 31.
• Added several new banner customers, including leading health and wellness brand Plexus Worldwide.
• Surpassed the 1 billion unique bug benchmark, meaning that Rollbar customers have now caught more than 1 billion unique bugs.

“Unlike our competitors, we believe that hardcoded algorithms cannot adapt to the diversity of errors and group them accurately, so we decided to use machine learning to identify patterns in stack traces. Our grouping engine treats each error differently, supported by modern AI technologies, and trained on billions of stack traces,” explained Arpad Tamasi, Rollbar principal product manager. “We work constantly to scale and refine the training process to increase grouping accuracy. I’m excited about what we’re achieving, and how much it benefits our clients.”

“Before Rollbar, we only had Loggly and New Relic, so we had to jump through hoops to see what the customer was experiencing. That led to substantial time spent looking through proxy logs and error captures. With Rollbar, we have so much more visibility,” said Ethan Salisbury, principal software engineer at Plexus Worldwide.

Mark George, director of software development at Plexus Worldwide, added some additional context: “Our cost savings thanks to Rollbar are well north of $100,000, potentially $250,000, because of how much it used to cost us to track down issues.”

Rollbar has helped more than 5,000 customers process more than 100 billion errors – resulting in a 9x increase in releases per year. The Continuous Code Improvement Platform has been a game changer for Rollbar customers. With Rollbar, customers are able to resolve errors within minutes, significantly increasing team productivity. Rollbar enables developers to spend less time monitoring, investigating and debugging, and more time creating new products and features that will delight their customers.

To get free access to Rollbar forever, click here.

About Rollbar

Rollbar is the leading continuous code improvement platform that enables developers to proactively discover and resolve issues in their code. Rollbar integrates with a development team’s existing toolchain to give greater coverage and insights into broken code, across the software lifecycle. With Rollbar, developers focus on deploying better software faster, knowing they can quickly recover from critical errors as they happen. Thousands of companies, including Twilio, Salesforce, Twitch, and Duolingo, use Rollbar for their most critical applications, ensuring happier customers and more productive development teams. Learn more at https://rollbar.com/ or follow us @Rollbar.

Survey Also Reveals That Fixing Bugs and Errors is Developers’ Leading Pain Point

SAN FRANCISCO – FEBRUARY 16, 2021 – New research from Rollbar, provider of real-time error monitoring Software as a Service, indicates that the overwhelming majority (88%) of developers feel that traditional error monitoring falls short of their expectations. The December survey of 1,000 developers also reveals that fixing bugs and errors in code is developers’ No. 1 pain point.

“This research highlights the extreme challenges that developers – and their businesses – face when addressing software bugs and errors,” said Francesco Crippa, vice president of engineering at Rollbar. “Traditional error monitoring simply doesn’t cut it in a world in which software has become an important aspect of how everything in society works.”

Gen Z developers were the age group most likely to complain about the old-school approach to error monitoring. Ninety-four percent of developers in the 18- to 24-year-old cohort admitted that traditional error monitoring doesn’t adequately meet all of their requirements.

And they’re not alone. More than three-fourths (79%) of Boomer developers agreed. Propeller Insights, which executed the Rollbar study, defines Boomers as people who are 65 or older.

The larger survey group said that traditional error monitoring is less than ideal because:

• It requires them to manually respond to errors (39%)
• It takes them too long to find all of the details they need to fix bugs and errors (36%)
• It focuses on system stability and not enough on code health (31%)
• It makes it difficult to detect errors (29%)
• Its approach to error aggregation is either too broad or too narrow (23%)

Manual Processes Make Fixing Bugs Time Consuming and Developer Work Unpleasant

Software allows for innovation, industry disruption, digital transformation, and positive outcomes for businesses and society. But it can also leave developers stuck in the weeds.

More than a third (38%) of developers said that they spend up to a quarter of their time fixing software bugs. Slightly more than a quarter (26%) said that they spend up to half their time fixing bugs. Eight percent of those surveyed said that they must dedicate up to three-fourths of their time to fixing bugs. Developers in the West tend to spend the most time fixing bugs. A tenth of the group in the Western U.S. said that up to 75% of their time involves such pursuits.

This is a major struggle for developers, as reflected by this next survey statistic: 44% of developers said their biggest pain point is fixing software bugs and errors. Millennial and Gen Z developers indicated that they find such efforts particularly painful. Nearly half (48.3%) of Millennial developers said fixing bugs and errors is their biggest pain point. Nearly as many Gen Z respondents (45.8%) said that they consider this the most painful aspect of their work.

In fact, nearly two-thirds of all developers said they would rather do an unpleasant activity than fix errors. More than a fourth (26%) said they would rather pay bills. More than a fifth (21%) said they would prefer going to the dentist. And 20% would rather spend time with their in-laws.

Developers Are Spending Too Much Time Fixing Code and Not Enough Time Writing It

Even more problematic is the fact that developers said that fixing code takes time away from more important work. Nearly a third (32%) of developers said they spend up to 10 hours a week fixing bugs instead of writing code. Sixteen percent said they spend up to 15 hours a week and 6% said they have to dedicate up to 20 hours a week fixing bugs instead of writing code.

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. Forty-two percent of the total survey group said they would be to do their job if not for the time spent on fixing bugs.

Manually Responding to Errors Creates Personal and Professional Problems for Developers

The Rollbar survey suggests that having to manually respond to errors is taking a huge toll on developers’ job performance, morale and even their overall quality of life.

More than a third of developers said if they didn’t have to spend so much time fixing code:

• They would spend more time with their family (37%)
• They would exercise more (33%)
• They would get a full night’s sleep (31%)

Nearly a third of the survey group (31%) said that manually responding to errors makes them feel frustrated. More than a fifth of developers (22%) said they feel overwhelmed when using manual processes to address errors in software. Nearly as many (17%) said it leads to burn out.

Some developers experience even stronger reactions. More than a tenth (12%) said it elicits feelings of resentment and 7% said it makes them want to quit their jobs. The desire to quit due to such processes was more pronounced with developers in the West – 9% of this group said that manually responding to errors makes them want to find employment elsewhere.

Business Suffers Too Because User Complaints and Software Errors Are Bad for the Brand

Despite all the time and pains developers take to fix code, errors and bugs still go undetected. Unfortunately, users often find these problems before developers and their employers do.

Nearly two-thirds of developers (62%) said they have found out about errors from users reporting through the app. Worse yet, software users may air their complaints in public forums. A quarter (25%) of developers said that they have heard about errors from users sharing these issues on social media. An even larger share of the older developers indicated they have had this experience. More than 70% of developers ages 45 to 64 and nearly 83% of developers older than 65 said that they have found out about errors by users complaining on social media.

Other times, developers said, they learn about software bugs and errors from media reports or even straight from the top – via their company’s CEO. Seventeen percent of developers reported that media coverage clued them in about errors in their software. More than a fifth (21%) of the developers in the Rollbar survey said they have heard about errors from their CEO.

Nearly nine in 10 developers (89%) agree that undetected errors can take a big toll on the business. More than a fourth (26%) of developers said that their employers have lost a significant number of users due to errors in software. The same share (26%) said software errors damage their company’s reputation and its ability to attract investments, and nearly a fifth (18%) said that undetected software problems anger their company’s existing investors.

“Software is now at the heart of every business, so they and their investors understand the value of providing great user experiences,” said Brian Rue, CEO and co-founder of Rollbar. “But software is made of code, and code isn’t perfect. Bugs and errors are inevitable. But with continuous code improvement, the developers responsible for mission-critical applications can not only identify bugs, and their root cause, faster, they can automate the steps to remediate them. That way, they can spend less time monitoring, investigating and debugging code and more time innovating to deliver business outcomes. Our Continuous Code Improvement Platform has been a game changer for Rollbar customers, who are now releasing into production five to nine times more often than before, while lowering their error escape rate and catching any bugs that do escape before users even notice.”

To get free access to Rollbar forever, click here.

About Rollbar

Rollbar is the leading continuous code improvement platform that proactively discovers, predicts, and remediates errors with real-time AI-assisted workflows. With Rollbar, developers continually improve their code and constantly innovate rather than spending time monitoring, investigating, and debugging. More than 5,000 businesses, including Twilio, Salesforce, Twitch, and Affirm, use Rollbar to deploy better software, faster while quickly recovering from critical errors as they happen. Learn more at Rollbar.com