Software intelligence benefits: the real value to your team
Posted Feb 21, 2017 | 3 min. (610 words)Customers adopting the Raygun Software Intelligence Platform sometimes ask about the impact they should see.
In our experience, we see teams noticing the cost to acquire customers lowers, developer productivity sky rockets and deployments go a lot smoother, among many things. I’ll go through exactly how we do this below.
Full visibility
Never lose sight of how your software is performing:
- Errors
- Performance
- Deployments
- Users
Raygun captures data about all these domains and how they overlap to create customer experiences.
In our own experience, only 1% of customers will ever report an issue. This is why integrated software intelligence is more valuable than relying on feedback. You need to capture everything to understand software health.
Cost of acquiring users
Most businesses are spending significantly in marketing to attract customers. These users come to your site or app, and see if you deliver value to them.
If your app is slow, or crashes, that user is out of there. They’re not sticking around to endure your lousy experience when competitors are just a single click away.
So, software intelligence benefits your development team by reducing the cost to acquire customers and keeping them happy.
Developer productivity: debugging
Today, software engineers are expensive. When your customers have issues, are your engineers spending significant time trying to find log files? More time reproducing errors? Claiming it “Works on my machine”?
I’d much rather have my team delivering features that our customers will love. If my team is spending half their time fixing bugs, then they’re not building out features.
Platforms should provide deep insight into what has happened, with enough context to solve the problem. This makes your team a lot more productive. They’re free to focus on delivering the future, rather than fixing the past.
When you’re working towards an ambitious roadmap, you need the team delivering features, not fixing old bugs.
Team management: prioritization of fixes
Things do go wrong and you need to allocate developer effort to those issues. Let me pose a question:
**What’s a high priority? A bug that’s occurred 500 times? **
**Or 10,000 times? **
The correct answer is “It depends. Which one affected more users?”
If it was 10,000 errors impacting one customer, then it’s not that big of a deal. If it’s 500 errors affecting 250 customers, then it’s a pretty big deal.
Amazon is famous for always measuring ‘customer impact’ of any outage or issue, because it’s what matters.
Your software intelligence platform should make it immediately visible to management what issues to prioritize:
Confidence to deploy
Raygun completes the CI/CD circuit by providing real-time feedback on software performance and errors to your team.
Even with a dedicated QA team, issues will slip through. This is where you need a safety net to ensure that issues that slipped through are discovered quickly.
If you have invested in deployment tooling, then the effort for a team member to deploy is low. Once they can trust that issues are identified, and they do not need to go hunting for why the issues occurred, they can deploy fixes quickly. This makes your <a href="/blog/agile-bug-management/"" target="_blank" rel=“noopener noreferrer”>software team truly agile.
Many more reasons
We love hearing how customers have improved their software development, and businesses, with Raygun. These examples above are only a few of the most common themes we hear about it. There’s many more, and we’d love to hear yours.
If you haven’t tried Raygun yet, do try our free 14 day trial and see for yourself how software intelligence benefits your business.
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