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Comment by buddym | Hacker News Reader

What people sometimes fail to realize is that proper testing disciplines can mitigate practically all bugs in production. I haven't seriously used a debugger in 2 years, methinks. So giving developers "X-ray vision" to their servers in production, however innovative, is not a real solution.

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Even if you were the team of mythical coders that foresees every possible corner case and is never under time pressure, you'll probably rely on millions of lines of code written by other organisations, that do contain bugs.

Applications fail; it's a real life fact. The most talented teams face bugs, even in applications which undergo extensive testing. Not to mention scenarios which are very hard to anticipate and simulate, mainly ones related to fast scaling.

As you are down voted I wonder: I have the same experience here. Very few serious problems (1/year) that come from developer bugs. Others seem to have much more, e.g. when people ask me if the devs here have pager duty (which they haven't).

I also wonder if we test too much (ca. 85% path coverage, 15k unit tests (3x rewritten), automatic selenium tests, explorative manual tests, automatic API tests, developer acceptance tests).

It certainly sounds like you're testing too much.

The most efficient use of resources is almost always proportionate allocation between code and other things. So if only a small proportion of your serious problems are code errors then you're either testing too much or not doing enough at other levels of the stack.

The real questions of course are whether your defect rate and the rate at which you introduce new features are where you want them to be.

Since even you admit testing does not eliminate all bugs, there are still cases when defects make it into production. Novel cases do happen, and some can be quite difficult to understand. I can see how this tool could be useful in those situations.

If you never face bugs in a project then you are missing something.

Obviously, proper testing is needed always.

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